It still lives in some old songs about Nelson or Waterloo,
which are vastly more pompous and vastly more sincere than the cockney
cocksureness of later Jingo lyrics. But it is hard to connect De Quincey
with it; or, indeed, with anything else. De Quincey would certainly have
been a happier man, and almost certainly a better man, if he had got
drunk on toddy with Wilson, instead of getting calm and clear (as he
himself describes) on opium, and with no company but a book of German
metaphysics. But he would hardly have revealed those wonderful vistas
and perspectives of prose, which permit one to call him the first and
most powerful of the decadents: those sentences that lengthen out like
nightmare corridors, or rise higher and higher like impossible eastern
pagodas. He was a morbid fellow, and far less moral than Burns; for when
Burns confessed excess he did not defend it. But he has cast a gigantic
shadow on our literature, and was as certainly a genius as Poe. Also he
had humour, which Poe had not. And if any one still smarting from the
pinpricks of Wilde or Whistler, wants to convict them of plagiarism in
their "art for art" epigrams--he will find most of what they said said
better in _Murder as One of the Fine Arts_.
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