Quince

“ Methinks that I could munch a savoury salad of thistles with much stomach to’t.
Quince. Your thistles be a thought too biting for my stomach.
Bottom. ’Tis but likely. I was ever a choice feeder. But, masters, was there not some matter toward, or have you assembled yourselves but to greet me, and, as ’twere, fittingly?
Quince. You speak quite to the matter, good Bottom. That is indeed the true end of our beginning. ”

“ The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.
[Exit.]
SCENE II. Athens. A Room in Quince’s House Enter Quince, Flute, Snout and Starveling. ”

“ Quince subsided into vague mutterings as to what she would do if she were a man, coupled with sundry aspersions upon the character, looks, and family connections of Farmer Rose, which somewhat consoled her for being what she was.
"He has always made jokes about your advice," she said at length, "and now everybody'll think he's right. ”

“ Quinate, kwī′nāt, adj. (bot.) having five leaflets on a petiole. [L. quini, five each.]
Quince, kwins, n. the golden, globose or pear-shaped, fragrant fruit of a large shrub or small tree (Pyrus Cydonia) of the rose family, too austere to be eaten raw, but excellent for jellies, marmalade, and flavouring other fruits. [Pl. of quine—O. Fr. coin (Fr. coing) —L. cydonium—Gr. Cydōnia, in Crete.]
Quincentenary, kwin-sen′te-nā-ri, adj. relating to five hundred, especially five hundred years.—n. a five hundredth anniversary. ”

“ Quince, thoughtfully.
Mr. Quince continued his labours. "Why?" he inquired, at last.
His wife smiled and tossed her head.
"Young Pascoe's no chance against our Ned," she said, swelling with maternal pride.
"Eh?" said the shoemaker, laying down his knife and fork. "Our Ned?"
"They are as fond of each other as they can be," said Mrs. Quince, "though I don't suppose Farmer Rose'll care for it; not but what our Ned's as good as he is."
"Is Ned up there now?" demanded the shoemaker, turning pale, as the mirthful face of Mr. Garnham suddenly occurred to him. ”

“ Quince mastered his wrath by an effort, and with no sign of discomposure moved away without making any reference to the identity of the unfortunate in the stable."
"Good-night," said the farmer, "and thank you for coming and giving me the fresh advice. It ain't everybody that 'ud ha' taken the trouble. If I hadn't lost that key——"
The shoemaker scowled, and with the two fat books under his arm passed the listening neighbours with the air of a thoughtful man out for an evening stroll. ”

“ For years Little Haven had regarded Mr. Quince with awe, as being far too dangerous a man for the lay mind to tamper with, and at one stroke the farmer had revealed the hollowness of his pretensions. Only that morning the wife of a labourer had called and asked him to hurry the mending of a pair of boots. She was a voluble woman, and having overcome her preliminary nervousness more than hinted that if he gave less time to the law and more to his trade it would be better for himself and everybody else. ”

“ Hence involutions and parentheses, “cycle on epicycle,” evolve themselves into a stately clearness and harmony; and sentences and paragraphs, loaded with suggestion, roll on smoothly and musically, without either fatiguing or cloying—rather, indeed, to the surprise as well as delight of the reader; for De Quincey is always ready to indulge in feats of style, witching the world with that sort of noble horsemanship which is as graceful as it is daring. ”

“ Quince, in a voice of easy unconcern, "and I gave you advice from memory. Looking up the subject after you'd gone I found that I was wrong."
"You don't say so?" said the farmer, uneasily. "If I've done wrong I'm only doing what you told me I could do."
"Mistakes will happen with the best of us," said the shoemaker, loudly, for the benefit of one or two murmurers. "I've known a man to marry a woman for her money before now and find out afterward that she hadn't got any." ”

“ De Quincey strikingly observes: “People that have practised composition as much, and with as vigilant an eye as myself, know also, by thousands of cases, how infinite is the disturbance caused in the logic of a thought by the mere position of a word as despicable as the word even. A mote that is in itself invisible, shall darken the august faculty of sight in a human eye,—the heavens shall be hid by a wretched atom that dares not show itself,—and the station of a syllable shall cloud the judgment of a council. ”

“ THE ENGLISH OPIUM EATER THOMAS DE QUINCEY II.—HIS BOOKS
'De Quincey! farewell! Many pleasing hours have we spent in the perusal of thy eloquent page, and not a few in listening to thy piercing words. Not a few tears have we given to thy early sorrows. With no little emotion have we followed the current of thy romantic narrative.'—Gilfillan's Literary Portraits.
WE have already seen that De Quincey's collected essays filled, in the edition prepared by himself, as many as fourteen volumes. ”

“ Quince, struggling to preserve an air of judicial calm.
"No, no," said Mr. Rose; "I ain't going to damage my property like that. I can lock my stable-door and unlock it when I like; if people get in there as have no business there, it's their look-out."
"That's law," said Mr. Hogg; "I'll eat my hat if it ain't."
"Do you mean to tell me you've really lost the key?" demanded Mr. Quince, eyeing the farmer sternly.
"Seems like it," said Mr. Rose. "However, he won't come to no hurt. ”

“ The relation between reality and image should be as invariable as mathematics. If such startling images cannot be used with perfect clearness and vivid perception of their usefulness and value, they should not be used at all. De Quincey is so successful because his mind comprehends every detail of the scene, and through the images we see the bottom truth as through a perfect crystal. ”

“ In none is that incurable curiosity, that infinite variety of desire for knowledge and for argument which age cannot quench, more observable. Few if any have the indefinable quality of freshness in so large a measure. You never quite know, though you may have a shrewd suspicion, what De Quincey will say on any subject ”

“ And you've generally got a man about the yard."
Mr. Hogg smacked his thigh in ecstasy.
"But—" began the farmer.
"That's the law," said the autocratic Mr. Quince, sharply. "O' course, if you think you know more about it than I do, I've nothing more to say."
"I don't want to do nothing I could get into trouble for," murmured Mr. Rose.
"You can't get into trouble by doing as I tell you," said the shoemaker, impatiently. "However, to be quite on the safe side, if I was in your place I should lose the key."
"Lose the key?" said the farmer, blankly. ”

“ The early boyhood of Thomas De Quincey is of more than ordinary interest, because of the clear light it throws upon the peculiar temperament and endowments of the man. Moreover, we have the best of authority in our study of this period, namely, the author himself, who in the Sketches already mentioned, and in his most noted work, The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, has told the story of these early years in considerable detail and with apparent sincerity. ”

“ Rose shook him off.
"Better make the best of it," continued the peace-maker.
"She's a girl to be proud of," said Lawyer Quince, keeping pace with the farmer on the other side. "She's got a head that's worth yours and mine put together, with Hogg's thrown in as a little makeweight."
"And here's the White Swan," said Mr. Hogg, who had a hazy idea of a compliment, "and all of us as dry as a bone. Why not all go in and have a glass to shut folks' mouths?"
"And cry quits," said the shoemaker.
"And let bygones be bygones," said Mr. Hogg, taking the farmer's arm again. ”

“ De Quincey was not a sturdy boy. Shy and dreamy, exquisitely sensitive to impressions of melancholy and mystery, he was endowed with an imagination abnormally active even for a child. It is customary to give prominence to De Quincey's pernicious habit of opium-eating, in attempting to explain the grotesque fancies and weird flights of his Page xiimarvellous mind in later years; yet it is only fair to emphasize the fact that the later achievements of that strange creative faculty were clearly foreshadowed in youth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This peculiarity of his style is connected with other qualities upon which a great deal of eulogy has been bestowed. There are two faculties in which, so far as my experience goes, no man, woman, or child ever admits his or her own deficiency. The driest of human beings will boast of their sense of humour; and the most perplexed, of their logical acuteness. De Quincey has been highly praised, both as a humorist and as a logician. ”

“ The dread of this encounter hung like a cloud over Thomas, yet he followed William loyally, and served with all the spirit of a cadet of the house. Imagination played an important part in this campaign, and it is for that reason primarily that to this and the other incidents of De Quincey's childhood prominence is here given; in no better way can we come to an understanding of the real nature of this singular man. ”

“ De Quincey, however, always returns to the subject in hand and defines very sharply the point of digression and of return. Another of his faults is an indulgence in involved sentences, which weaken the vigor and simplicity of the style.
Despite these faults, De Quincey is a great master of language. He deserves study for the three most striking characteristics of his style,—precision, stateliness, and harmony.
SUMMARY The tide of reaction, which had for same time been gathering force, swept triumphantly over England in this age of Romanticism. ”

“ The master-idea of the 'Suspiria' is the power which lies in suffering, in agony unuttered and unutterable, to develop the intellect and the spirit of man; to open these to the ineffable conceptions of the infinite, and to [Pg 2] some discernment, otherwise impossible, of the beneficent might that lies in pain and sorrow. De Quincey seeks his symbols sometimes in natural phenomena, oftener in the creation of mighty abstractions ”

“ By its help I was able to fix the authorship by De Quincey of (1) The Dog Story—translated from the German, (2) Moral Effects of Revolutions, (3) Prefigurations of Remote Events, (4) Abstract of Swedenborgianism by Immanuel Kant.
Another perplexing element was the letter written by De Quincey to his uncle, Colonel Penson, in 1819 (Page's Life, vol. i. p. 207) , wherein reference is made to certain contributions to Blackwood's Magazine and The Quarterly Review. ”

“ A very valuable list of all De Quincey's writings, in chronological order, is given by Fred N. Scott, in his edition of De Quincey's essays on Style, Rhetoric, and Language (Allyn & Bacon) . Numerous magazine articles may be found by referring to Poole's Index. Page xxiv
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Autobiographic Sketches, Chap. I.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Part II.
[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. ”

“ The home life of this eccentric yet lovable man of genius seems to have been always affectionate and tender in spite even of his bondage to opium; it was especially beautiful and childlike in his latest years. His eldest daughter, Margaret, assumed quietly the place of headship, and with a discretion equal to her devotion she watched over her father's welfare. With reference to De Quincey's circumstances at this time, his biographer, Mr. ”

“ After this long recess De Quincey was placed in the grammar school at Manchester, his guardians expecting that a three years' course in this school would bring him a scholarship at Oxford. However, the new environment proved wholly uncongenial, and the sensitive boy who, in spite of his shyness and his slender frame, possessed grit in abundance, and who was through life more or less a law to himself, made up his mind to run away. His flight was significant. Early on a July morning he slipped quietly off—in one pocket a copy of an English poet, a volume of Euripides in the other. ”

“ My impression, however, is that he did nothing Page 74of the sort, but deputed any necessary increment of his Bergmann materials to his own lively imagination."
1 1. The first three paragraphs of the essay, comprising the formal introduction, are intentionally rather more picturesque and vivacious in style than the ordinary narrative that follows. If these paragraphs be read consecutively aloud, the student will surely feel the sweep and power of De Quincey's eloquence. ”

“ Ned put the key in the lock and flinging the door open revealed Celia Rose, blinking and confused in the sudden sunshine. She drew back as she saw her father and began to cry with considerable fervour.
"How did you get in that shed, miss?" demanded her parent, stamping.
Miss Rose trembled.
"I—I went there," she sobbed. "I didn't want to go away."
"Well, you'd better stay there," shouted the over-wrought Mr. Rose. "I've done with you. A girl that 'ud turn against her own father I—I—"
He drove his right fist into his left palm and stamped out into the road. Lawyer Quince and Mr. ”