Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

THINGS THAT NEVER COULD RECUR. 437
he wrote articles, framed his appeals for aid with such
skilled and accustomed yet quivering and strange
reality. The articles are buried and done with, with
all their fine diction and elaborate exactitude of style.
But still the man's nerves tingle and his bosom swells
in these scraps of worn paper. The fact that we
weary at last of the carefully compiled appeals and
petitions does not lessen the sensation of their ab-
solute reality, and the throbbing life of which their
pages is so full. De Quincey is as usual confident
that such a state of things can "never recur":
I have to thank you greatly for the very liberal manner in
which you thought proper to overpay my exertions on this
occasion, and for the allowance you made for the agitated state
of feeling in which I was placed by sudden circumstances
more especially as you made this allowance at the very moment
when you were suffering from the heavy anxieties and the
pressure of extra expenses which my delay, however involun-
tary on my part, had caused. Such a state of things, it is
satisfactory to know, never can recur. . . . And, by the way,
let me add to my account of the tremendous hindrances in
these moments—that over and above the suspense and agitation
such as I have already described to you, on every night of that
important week I had to write a very long letter equal to
2| pp. of ' Maga ; so that the mere drain of time, had every-
'
thing else been favourable, was simply sufficient to have ruined
my progress. However, this I need not dwell on. Such a case
cannot recur; and against any lighter case of distress I am
amply secured by gratitude.
Alas for poor De Quincey ! his systematic promises,
his certainties that after this one crisis is safely tided
over nothing else of the kind can ever recur, his
tremendous agitations and still more tremendous
letter - writing, page after page in his small close
handwriting, always elaborate in style, always con-
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