[4] De Quincey (English Men of Letters), David Masson, p. 110.
HOW TO READ DE QUINCEY.
"De Quincey's sixteen volumes of magazine articles are full of brain from beginning to end. At the rate of about half a volume a day, they would serve for a month's reading, and a month continuously might be worse expended. There are few courses of reading from which a young man of good natural intelligence would come away more instructed, charmed, and stimulated, or, to express the matter as definitely as possible, with his mind more stretched. Good natural intelligence, a certain fineness of fibre, and some amount of scholarly education, have to be presupposed, indeed, in all readers of De Quincey. But, even for the fittest readers, a month's complete and continuous course of De Quincey would be too much. Better have him on the shelf, and take down a volume at intervals for one or two of the articles to which there may be an immediate attraction. An evening with De Quincey in this manner will always be profitable."
DAVID MASSON, Life of De Quincey, Chap. XI.
REVOLT OF THE TARTARS;
OR, FLIGHT OF THE KALMUCK KHAN AND HIS PEOPLE
FROM THE RUSSIAN TERRITORIES TO THE
FRONTIERS OF CHINA.
There is no great event in modern history, or, perhaps
it may be said more broadly, none in all history, from its
earliest records, less generally known, or more striking to
the imagination, than the flight eastwards of a principal
Tartar nation across the boundless steppes of Asia in the 5
latter half of the last century. The terminus a quo of this
flight and the terminus ad quem are equally magnificent—the
mightiest of Christian thrones being the
one, the mightiest of pagan the other; and the grandeur of these
two terminal objects is harmoniously supported by the 10
romantic circumstances of the flight. In the abruptness
of its commencement and the fierce velocity of its execution
we read an expression of the wild, barbaric character
of the agents. In the unity of purpose connecting this
myriad of wills, and in the blind but unerring aim at a 15
mark so remote, there is something which recalls to the
mind those almighty instincts that propel the migrations of
the swallow and the leeming or the life-withering marches
of the locust. Then, again, in the gloomy vengeance of
Russia and her vast artillery, which hung upon the rear 20
and the skirts of the fugitive vassals, we are reminded of
Miltonic images—such, for instance, as that of the solitary
hand pursuing through desert spaces and through
ancient chaos a rebellious host, and overtaking with volleying
thunders those who believed themselves already
within the security of darkness and of distance.