But that which in Rousseau was a creed, became in
Hazlitt a taste and in Lamb little more than a whim. These latter and
their like form a group at the beginning of the nineteenth century of
those we may call the Eccentrics: they gather round Coleridge and his
decaying dreams or linger in the tracks of Keats and Shelley and Godwin;
Lamb with his bibliomania and creed of pure caprice, the most unique of
all geniuses; Leigh Hunt with his Bohemian impecuniosity; Landor with
his tempestuous temper, throwing plates on the floor; Hazlitt with his
bitterness and his low love affair; even that healthier and happier
Bohemian, Peacock. With these, in one sense at least, goes De Quincey.
He was, unlike most of these embers of the revolutionary age in letters,
a Tory; and was attached to the political army which is best represented
in letters by the virile laughter and leisure of Wilson's _Noctes
Ambrosianae_. But he had nothing in common with that environment. It
remained for some time as a Tory tradition, which balanced the cold and
brilliant aristocracy of the Whigs. It lived on the legend of Trafalgar;
the sense that insularity was independence; the sense that anomalies are
as jolly as family jokes; the general sense that old salts are the salt
of the earth.
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