Thomas De Quincey

“ Now here, in Scotland, is a feud past all arbitration: here is a schism no longer theoretic, neither beginning nor ending in mere speculation; here is a change of doctrine, on one side or the other, which throws a sad umbrage of doubt and perplexity over the pastoral relation of the church to every parish in Scotland. Less confidence there must always be henceforward in great religious incorporations. Was there any such incorporation reputed to be more internally harmonious than the Scottish church? None has been so tempestuously agitated. ”

“ But, unfortunately, it sometimes happens, that, to gain as much as is needful in one direction, you must take a great deal more than you wish for in another. Any principle, which could carry them over the immediate difficulty, would, by a mere necessity, carry them incalculably beyond it. For if every act bearing in any one direction a spiritual aspect, showing at any angle a relation to spiritual things, is therefore to be held spiritual in a sense excluding the interference of the civil power, there falls to the ground at once the whole fabric of civil authority in any independent form. ”

“ A cat may look at a king; and upon this or that out-of-the-way point a writer may presume to be more knowing than his reader—the serf may undertake to convert his lord. The reader is a great being—a great noun-substantive; but still, like a mere adjective, he is liable to the three degrees of comparison. He may rise above himself—he may transcend the ordinary level of readers, however exalted that level be. Being great, he may become greater. Full of light, he may yet labor with a spot or two of darkness. ”

“ Truths speculative oftentimes, drives its roots into depth so dark, that the falsifications to which it is liable, though detected, cannot always be exposed to the light of day—the result is known, but not therefore seen. Truth personal, on the other hand, may be easily made to confront its falsifier, not with refutation only, but with the visible shame of refutation. Such sharoe would settle upon every page of Pope's satires and moral epistles, oftentimes upon every couplet, if any censor, armed with an adequate knowledge of the facts, were to prosecute the inquest. ”

“ But the establishment, by parity of reason, retained upon its rolls all the degrees, all the modifications, all who had exercised a wise discretion, who, in so great a cause, had thought it a point of religion to be cautious; whose casuistry had moved in the harness of peace, and who had preferred an interest of conscience to a triumph of partisanship. We honor them for that policy; but we cannot hide from ourselves, that the very principle which makes such a policy honorable at the moment, makes it dangerous in reversion. ”

“ In the eloquent language of his present historian, 'he snatched from darkness all the lands he conquered; and may be said to have added the whole of Germany to the world.' Wherever he moved, civilization followed his footsteps. What he conquered was emphatically the conquest of his own genius; and his vast empire was, in a peculiar sense, his own creation. And what, under general circumstances, would have exposed the hollowness and insufficiency of his establishment, was for him, in particular, the seal and attestation of his extraordinary grandeur of mind. ”

“ By a great transmigration, festal assemblages had assumed their proper station, and had unfolded their capacities, as true auxiliaries to the same general functions of intellect—otherwise expressing themselves and feeding themselves through literature, through the fine arts, and through scenic representations. A new world of pleasures had opened itself, offering new subjects of activity to the intellect, but also presupposing a new discipline and experience for enjoying them. ”

“ Less power, or power less harmonious, or power the most consummate, administered with less absolute skill, would doubtless have been found incompetent to struggle with the tempestuous assaults which then lowered over the entire frontier of France. It was natural, and, upon the known constitution of human nature, pretty nearly inevitable, that, in the course of the very extended warfare which followed, love for that glorious trade—so irritating and so contagious—should be largely developed in a mind as aspiring as Charlemagne's, and stirred by such generous sensibilities. ”

“ As to that evil which acts through opinion, it acts by a machinery, viz. the press and social centralization in great cities, which in these days is perfect. Right or wrong, justified or not justified by the acts of the majority, it is certain that every public body—how much more, then, a body charged with the responsibility of upholding the truth in its standard!—suffers dreadfully in the world's opinion by any feud, schism, or shadow of change among its members. This is what the New Testament, a code of philosophy fertile in new ideas, first introduced under the name of scandal ”

“ A vast revolution was at hand for Europe; all her tribes were destined to be fused in a new crucible, to be recast in happier moulds, and to form one family of enlightened nations, to compose one great collective brotherhood, united by the tie of a common faith and a common hope, and hereafter to be known to the rest of the world, and to proclaim this unity, under the comprehensive name of Christendom. Baptism therefore was the indispensable condition and forerunner of civilization ”

“ Female travellers are apt to talk of 'scenery' as all in all, but men require a social interest superadded. Mere scenery palls upon the mind, where it is the sole and ever-present attraction relied on. It should come unbidden and unthought of, like the warbling of birds, to sustain itself in power. And at feeding-time we observe that men of all nations and languages, Tros Tyriusve, grow savage, if, by a fine scene, you endeavor to make amends for a bad beef-steak. The scenery of the Himalaya will not 'draw houses' till it finds itself on a line of good hotels. ”

“ Out of this one principle of subtle and lurking antagonism, may be explained everything which has been denounced under the idea of pedantry in Milton. It is the key to all that lavish pomp of art and knowledge which is sometimes put forward by Milton in situations of intense solitude, and in the bosom of primitive nature—as, for example, in the Eden of his great poem, and in the Wilderness of his Paradise Regained. The shadowy exhibition of a regal banquet in the desert, draws out and stimulates the sense of its utter solitude and remotion from men or cities. ”

“ For it is no easy matter to do that where a man dodges behind texts and notes, and shuffles between verse and prose, mystifying the reader, and designing to do so. Under the torture of cross-examination let us force Pope to explain what literature that is which, having glorified France, became the venerable mother of a fine English literature in an early stage of the fifteenth century? ”

“ It is clear that the writer exists for the sake of the reader, not the reader for the sake of the writer. Besides, the writer bears all sorts of characters, whilst the reader universally has credit for the best possible. We have all heard of 'the courteous reader,' 'the candid reader,' 'the enlightened reader.' But which of us ever heard of 'the discourteous reader,' 'the mulish reader,' 'the barbarous reader?' Doubtless there is no such person. The Goths and Vandals are all confined to the writers. 'The reader'—that great character—is ever wise, ever learned, ever courteous. ”

“ Pope, for such a purpose, has some real advantages. He is far enough from our own times to stand aloof from the corroding controversies of the age—he is near enough to speak in a diction but slightly differing from our own. He is sparkling with wit and brilliant good sense, and his poems are all separately short. But if Lord Carlisle count it for his main advantage that he is by distinction a moral poet, and this I must suppose in order to find any solution whatever for the eagerness to press him upon the attention of our most numerous classes, when is it that this idea has originated? ”

“ In any argument with such a man, he would be found immediately falling back upon the principle of the Free Church; he would insist upon it as a spiritual right, as a ease entirely between his conscience and God, whether he should press to an extremity any and every doctrine, though tending to the instant disorganization of society. To lecture against war, and against taxes as directly supporting war, would wear a most colorable air of truth amongst all weak-minded persons. ”

“ Not to linger upon the nursery silliness that could swallow the legend of epicureanism surviving up to the very brink of the grave, and when even the hypocrisy of medical hope had ceased to flatter, what a cruel memento of the infirmity charged upon himself was Pope preparing whilst he intended nothing worse than a falsehood! He meant only to tell a lie; naturally, perhaps, saying to himself, What's one lie more or less? ”

“ If we Englishmen may not pistol Greek canine ruffians, at any rate we suppose an English bulldog has a right to make a tour in Greece, A mastiff, if he pays for his food and lodgings, possesses as good a title, to see Athens and the Peloponnesus as a Bavarian, and a better than a Turk; and, if he cannot be suffered to pass quietly along the roads on his own private affairs, the more is the pity. ”

“ Mortifying it might certainly seem for the members of a supreme court, like the General Assembly, to be baffled by those of a subordinate court: but still, since each party must be regarded as representing far larger interests than any personal to themselves, trying on either side, not the energies of their separate wits, but the available resources of law in one of its obscurer chapters, there really seemed no more room for humiliation to the one party, or for triumph to the other, than there is amongst reasonable men in the result from a game, where the game is one exclusively of chance. ”

“ In fact, besides the disproportionate annoyance to a traveller's nerves, that he shall be kept uneasy at every turn of the road in mere anxiety as to the next recurrence of struggles so desperate, it arms the indignation of a bold Briton beforehand—that a horrid brute shall be thought entitled to kill him; and if he does, it is pronounced an accident: but if he, a son of the mighty island, kills the brute, instantly a little hybrid Greek peasant shall treat it as murder. ”

“ History may furnish her striking correspondences, Biography her splendid parallels, Rome may in certain cases appear but the mirror of Athens, England of Rome,—and yet, after all, no character can be cited, no great transaction, no revolution of 'high-viced cities,' no catastrophe of nations, which, in the midst of its resemblances to distant correspondences in other ages, docs not include features of abundant distinction and individualizing characteristics, so many and so important, as to yield its own peculiar matter for philosophical meditation and its own separate moral. ”

“ It is pretty clear at starting that, in order to be a moralist of the first rank, that is, to carry a great moral truth with heart-shaking force into the mind, a moralist must begin by becoming a poet. For instance, 'to justify the ways of God to man.' That is a grand moral doctrine; but to utter the doctrine authentically a man must write a 'Paradise Lost.' The order of precedency, therefore, between poets and moralists, as laid down by Lord Byron, is very soon inverted by a slight effort of reflection. ”

“ Hence, by the way, the extreme folly of those who have attempted to trace a parallel between Napoleon and the first Caesar. The heaven-born Julius, as beyond all dispute the greatest man of ancient history in moral grandeur, and therefore raised unspeakably above comparison with one who was eminent, even amongst ordinary men, for the pettiness of his passions—so also, upon an intellectual trial, will be found to challenge pretty nearly an equal precedency. Meantime, allowing for the inequality of their advantages, even Caesar would not have disdained a comparison with Charlemagne. ”

“ For, though it might be gratifying to a mere interest of curiosity, yet I believe that we should both be grieved if anything were to unsettle in our feelings the mysterious sanctities of Jerusalem, or to disturb that awful twilight which will for ever brood over Judea—by letting in upon it the 'common light of day;' and this effect would infallibly take place, if any one department of daily life, as it existed in Judea, were brought with all the degrading minutiae of its details within the petty finishing of a domestic portrait. ”

“ Whom shall we pronounce a fit writer to be laid before an auditory of working-men, as a model of what is just in composition—fit either for conciliating their regard to literature at first or afterwards for sustaining it? ”

“ Infinite change, illimitable novelty, inexhaustible difference, these are the foundations upon which nature builds and ratifies her purpose of individuality—so indispensable, amongst a thousand other great uses, to the very elements of social distinctions and social rights, But for the endless circumstances of difference which characterize external objects, the rights of property, for instance, would have stood upon no certain basis, nor admitted of any general or comprehensive guarantee. ”