personality. As to the _Autobiographic Sketches_, the handling of
events is hopelessly arbitrary and fragmentary. In truth, De Quincey is
drawing an idealized picture of childhood,--creating a type rather than
re-creating a person; it is a study of a child of talent that we
receive from him, and as such these sketches form one of the most
satisfactory products of his pen.

The _Confessions_ as a narrative is related to the Autobiography,
while its poetical passages range it with the _Suspiria_ and the
_Mail-Coach_. De Quincey seems to have believed that he was
creating in such writings a new literary type of prose poetry or prose
phantasy; he had, with his splendid dreams as subject-matter, lifted
prose to heights hitherto scaled only by the poet. In reality his style
owed much to the seventeenth-century writers, such as Milton and Sir
Thomas Browne. He took part with Coleridge, Lamb, and others in the
general revival of interest in earlier modern English prose, which is a
feature of the Romantic Movement. Still none of his contemporaries
wrote as he did; evidently De Quincey has a distinct quality of his
own. Ruskin, in our own day, is like him, but never the same.

Yet De Quincey's prose poetry is a very small portion of his work, and
it is not in this way only that he excels. Mr. Saintsbury has spoken of
the strong appeal that De Quincey makes to boys. [Footnote: "Probably
more boys have in the last forty years been brought to a love of
literature proper by De Quincy than by any other writer whatever."--
_History of Nineteenth-Century Literature_, p.198.] It is not
without significance that he mentions as especially attractive to the
young only writings with a large narrative element. [Footnote: "To read
the _Essay on Murder_, the _English Mail-Coach_, _The Spanish
Nun_, _The Caesars_, and half a score other things at the age of