1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Thomas De Quincey's "Memorials and Other Papers '— Complete" is a profound exploration of memory, identity, and the complexities of the human condition. This collection interlaces autobiographical reflections with philosophical musings, demonstrating De Quincey's mastery of prose that is eloquent yet infused with introspective depth. Written during the transition of Romanticism to Victorianism, the text serves as a bridge between these literary movements, capturing the nuanced relationship between personal experience and broader societal themes, questioning the nature of reality and perception through meticulously crafted narratives and poignant observations. De Quincey, originally a scholar and opium eater, uniquely positions himself within the literary landscape of his time. His struggles with addiction profoundly influenced his portrayal of consciousness and memory, mirroring the existential queries of his contemporaries. These life experiences deeply inform his writing, as he draws on his tumultuous past to reflect on the weight of nostalgia and the quest for understanding oneself amidst life's vicissitudes. His connections with other literary figures of the era, alongside his rich philosophical background, further enhance the depth and resonance of this work. This book comes highly recommended for readers who appreciate the complexities of memory and the intricacies of human experience. De Quincey's articulate prose offers both intellectual stimulation and emotional resonance, making it an essential read for scholars of Romantic literature, as well as anyone interested in the profound explorations of self and society. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Ähnliche
Memorials and Other Papers — Complete
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection, Memorials and Other Papers — Complete, brings together the entirety of Thomas De Quincey’s work issued under that title, uniting its two volumes within one continuous presentation. The purpose is not to assemble “complete works” in a comprehensive sense, but to provide the full span of these particular memorials, essays, narratives, and dialogues as they were grouped by De Quincey. Read in sequence, the volumes reveal a writer whose reflective prose moves between personal recollection, historical meditation, and imaginative construction, allowing readers to perceive the coherence of his interests and the versatility of his methods across related but distinct modes of writing.
Volume I is framed by paratexts that orient the reader to its scope: From the Author, to the American Editor of his Works and Explanatory Notices signal De Quincey’s attention to presentation and reception. Within this frame appear pieces identified in the volume’s contents, including The Orphan Heiress, Visit to Laxton, The Priory, Oxford, The Pagan Oracles, and The Revolution of Greece. The arrangement moves from prefatory commentary to varied papers that combine description, recollection, and inquiry. The selection is not uniform in form, and that heterogeneity is a feature: the volume invites the reader to follow De Quincey as he shifts focus with deliberate purpose.
Volume II presents a complementary set of works that underscore De Quincey’s generic range. Its contents list Klosterheim [1832.], The Sphinx’s Riddle, and The Templars’ Dialogues. Klosterheim [1832.] stands as a substantial romance from an earlier moment in his career, while The Sphinx’s Riddle and The Templars’ Dialogues adopt essayistic and dialogic frameworks to pursue questions in a more speculative, conversational key. Together, these pieces demonstrate how De Quincey extends the reflective habits evident in Volume I into narrative and debate, completing the picture of a writer as attentive to form as to subject, and intent on exploring ideas through multiple avenues.
The genres represented across the set are notably diverse. Readers will find memorial sketches and reflective papers, place-centered essays, historical and classical inquiries, a full-length romance, and philosophically inflected dialogues. The paratexts exhibit the period’s editorial culture; the essays and notices display De Quincey’s habit of contextual explanation; the narrative items reveal his capacity to sustain imaginative structure; and the dialogues stage intellectual positions in conversation. Rather than isolating De Quincey in any one category, the collection shows him moving fluently among modes—observational, argumentative, and narrative—while maintaining an authorial presence that connects these pieces as parts of a deliberately varied literary project.
A unifying thread is memorialization: the act of preserving, interrogating, and arranging memory. Whether evoking a house or a university, reflecting on ancient rites or modern political upheaval, De Quincey treats his subjects as occasions for recollection disciplined by inquiry. He uses specific topics to pose broader questions about how the past is known, how institutions sustain or obscure meaning, and how private impressions coexist with public narratives. That recurrent movement—between subjective remembrance and disciplined reflection—binds disparate materials into a single undertaking. The result is a body of writing that observes, remembers, and evaluates, inviting readers to participate in the work of thoughtful commemoration.
Stylistically, the collection exemplifies De Quincey’s celebrated amplitude of sentence and cadence of thought. His prose is reflective without being opaque, layering exposition with turning points of emphasis that guide the reader through analysis and evocation. He is hospitable to digression, but his digressions typically return to the central question with sharpened focus. Across genres, the texture of his writing remains consistent: a careful orchestration of tone, an ear for rhythm, and an appetite for making connections across fields of knowledge. These are not effects for their own sake; they are instruments for thinking on the page, shaping argument as much as atmosphere.
Part of the collection’s enduring significance lies in its scope. It demonstrates that De Quincey’s intellect was not confined to a single subject or method, and it resists any reduction of his reputation to one work or one mode. By placing historical inquiry beside memoiristic sketches and a romance beside dialogues, the volumes disclose how his interests interpenetrate: the imaginative informs the critical; the historical informs the personal. This interplay amplifies the force of each piece, suggesting that De Quincey’s best contributions occur not in isolation but in concert, where an awareness of form strengthens the reach of his analysis and the resonance of his memory.
The materials often grouped as “memorials” approach their topics as episodes of remembrance rather than as exhaustive chronicles. The Orphan Heiress, Visit to Laxton, and The Priory, for instance, are not merely descriptive; they are essays in attention, selecting details that carry moral or historical weight. Their narrative tendencies do not convert them into fiction; instead, they preserve the essay’s reflective center while adopting the pacing and texture of storytelling. In these works, De Quincey models a method: observe keenly, connect patiently, and let an object or place disclose its significance through carefully arranged impressions and inferences that respect both feeling and fact.
When the focus turns to the classical and the political, as in The Pagan Oracles and The Revolution of Greece, De Quincey extends the same method to collective experience. Ancient practices become subjects for critical examination; contemporary events invite measured historical framing. He is less concerned with compiling minute data than with clarifying terms, testing assumptions, and tracing the consequences of inherited narratives. The resulting essays neither sermonize nor merely catalog; they work toward intelligibility—how a reader might hold the antique and the modern in view and recognize the distances and continuities that make both meaningful. The emphasis is on interpretation grounded in careful reading of precedent.
Oxford, and the companion pieces centered on English places, draw attention to the ways institutions and landscapes shape understanding. Here again, De Quincey’s approach is synthetic: architecture, custom, and memory become coordinates for thinking about culture. Oxford is not only a scene; it is an occasion for reflecting on formation and tradition. The Priory and Visit to Laxton likewise treat location as argument, suggesting that built environments and rural settings encode ideas as surely as books do. Without dissolving into mere topography, these essays practice a humane scholarship, attentive to how places carry time within them and how observation can recover that inheritance.
Volume II’s balance of romance, essay, and dialogue gathers and tests the habits established earlier. Klosterheim [1832.] offers a sustained fictional structure—not as an escape from analysis, but as another medium for exploring motive, conduct, and atmosphere. The Sphinx’s Riddle turns to a more overtly interrogative mode, treating difficulty and ambiguity as productive. The Templars’ Dialogues uses conversation to stage multiple perspectives, letting positions emerge and refine through exchange rather than fiat. Read together, these works underline De Quincey’s belief that form matters: a problem might find its best expression in narrative, a speculation in essay, and a debate in dialogue.
For contemporary readers, the principal value of this “Complete” arrangement is clarity. With both volumes present and their paratexts intact, the collection reveals its internal design: an author deliberately juxtaposes memorial, essay, narrative, and dialogue to engage memory, history, and idea. The address to an American editor foregrounds the conditions of transmission, reminding us that these papers were meant to reach a broad audience. The continuous sequence offers a coherent experience and a reliable basis for study, while the variety ensures that the encounter remains lively. The set endures because it models rigorous, capacious reading—of places, of events, and of minds at work.
Author Biography
Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) was an English essayist of the Romantic and early Victorian periods, best known for Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. His prose combined autobiographical candor, philosophical reflection, and imaginative rhetoric, helping to redefine the essay as a vehicle for psychological and aesthetic exploration. Moving among the Lake Poets and the burgeoning magazine culture, he became a central figure in early nineteenth‑century literary journalism. De Quincey’s work mapped the borderlands between sensation and intellect, anticipating later interests in memory, dream, and the unconscious. Though often beset by financial strain and ill health, he produced a large and influential body of writing that continues to attract readers and scholars.
Born in Manchester to a family involved in commerce, De Quincey showed precocious aptitude for languages, especially Greek. He attended Manchester Grammar School and, after a period of youthful wandering, went up to Oxford, entering Worcester College. He did not take a degree, but his Oxford years consolidated a lifelong engagement with classical literature and philosophy. He fell under the sway of the new Romantic poetry, particularly the work of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose experiments in language, nature, and introspection strongly shaped his literary ambitions. He also read contemporary periodicals and German thought, interests that would later inform his critical essays and translations.
Drawn by admiration for the Lake Poets, De Quincey settled for stretches in the Lake District in the 1810s, where he cultivated friendships with Wordsworth and Coleridge. He briefly edited a provincial newspaper in the late 1810s, an experience that introduced him to the rhythms and pressures of print culture. Around this time he married and began a family, an added responsibility that sharpened his need for regular income. He contributed essays and reviews to magazines, displaying a talent for penetrating, sometimes idiosyncratic criticism. “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” an early landmark, proposed a psychological reading of Shakespearean tragedy that announced his enduring preoccupation with the anatomy of terror.
In the early 1820s De Quincey published Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in the London Magazine, expanding it into book form soon after. The work recounts his adoption of opium for relief of pain and the subsequent lure and ordeal of addiction, framed by remarkable dream-visions and reflections on memory, guilt, and redemption. Its candid subject matter and ornate, hypnotic style made an immediate impression, securing his reputation and provoking debate about morality and self-exposure in print. He later revisited and expanded the Confessions in the 1850s, clarifying episodes and recasting their structure. The book set a precedent for modern autobiographical writing on intoxication, illness, and the fractured self.
From the late 1820s De Quincey based much of his career in Scotland, writing prolifically for Blackwood’s Magazine, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, and other journals. He ranged across forms: visionary prose (“Suspiria de Profundis”; “The English Mail-Coach”), literary criticism, biographical portraiture (“The Last Days of Immanuel Kant”), satire (“On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” with later sequels), and political economy (The Logic of Political Economy). His sentences, musical yet intricately subordinated, aimed to reproduce the motions of thought. He also issued serial “Autobiographic Sketches,” further elaborating his life story. Through periodical installments and later collected editions, he reshaped earlier pieces, treating his oeuvre as a revisable, evolving corpus.
Across these writings, De Quincey explored the moral and aesthetic dimensions of fear, crime, and sublimity, often blending ironic detachment with genuine unease. His essays on murder, pitched as mock-lectures, expose the sensational appetite of audiences while testing the boundaries of taste. The dream pieces pursue the mechanics of memory, association, and compulsion, giving literary form to experiences later discussed by psychology. A committed advocate of Wordsworth’s achievement, he practiced a criticism that fused close reading with associative reverie. On political and social questions he wrote as a conservative-leaning observer, though his best work remains less programmatic than exploratory, attentive to the textures of language, conscience, and imaginative power.
De Quincey spent his later decades largely in and around Edinburgh, continuing to meet deadlines amid recurring financial difficulty and the persistent management of opium use. In the 1850s he oversaw a collected edition of his writings, revising and arranging essays that had first appeared in magazines. He died in 1859. His influence has extended well beyond his century: Edgar Allan Poe drew on his analyses of terror and hallucination, and Charles Baudelaire adapted and debated his accounts of intoxication. Modern readers value De Quincey for stylistic daring and psychological nuance, and his work remains a touchstone for studies of Romanticism, the essay, and narratives of altered consciousness.
Historical Context
Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) wrote across the high Romantic and early Victorian eras, and the pieces gathered in Memorials and Other Papers reflect a career shaped by rapid cultural change. Born in Manchester, educated at Worcester College, Oxford, and long resident at Grasmere and later Edinburgh, he circulated among the Lake Poets while contributing to London and Scottish periodicals. The collection’s essays, reminiscences, fictional experiments, and dialogues were composed between the 1820s and 1850s, a span that witnessed the end of the Napoleonic order, the reconfiguration of Europe, and the consolidation of mass print culture, all of which inflect his historical, philosophical, and antiquarian concerns.
De Quincey’s intellectual formation unfolded under the shadow of the French Revolution and the long Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815). British mobilization, wartime finance, and anxieties about continental ideologies permeated the press in which he later wrote. The settlements of 1814–1815 and the Congress of Vienna framed a conservative order policed by Metternich, provoking cycles of unrest from Spain and Italy to Poland and the German states. Britain’s domestic aftershocks included the Peterloo Massacre (Manchester, 1819) and debates about representation, liberty, and order. These contexts feed his interest in sovereignty, clandestine authority, national awakening, and the moral psychology of political crisis that surfaces across narratives and essays.
Oxford supplied De Quincey with the classical training that undergirds his reflections throughout the collection. Entering Worcester College in 1803 and departing without a degree in 1808, he passed through an institution reshaping its curriculum around Literae Humaniores (formalized in 1808). Later, the Oxford Movement (from John Keble’s Assize Sermon of 1833, with John Henry Newman and E. B. Pusey) stirred nationwide religious debate about authority, antiquity, and ritual. Classical ethics, patristic scholarship, and Anglican controversies furnished the intellectual furniture for his meditations on the ancient world, medieval institutions, and the moral genealogy of modern Britain, linking university culture to broader historical inquiry.
In 1807 De Quincey first met William Wordsworth in the Lake District and by 1809 had settled at Grasmere, spiritually adopting the Lakeland landscape and its circle. The Wordsworth–Coleridge nexus encouraged a poetics of memory and introspection, yet also pointed toward historical critique: the moral uses of rural tradition, the character of English institutions, and the psychological impact of social change. Westmorland, with its yeoman histories and parish structures, offered vantage on continuity and loss in an industrializing nation. Throughout his career, the Lake aesthetic—interior revelation, moralized landscape, and antiquarian curiosity—anchors his approach to estates, monastic remains, and classical survivals treated in these volumes.
The periodical marketplace formed De Quincey’s primary medium and method. After Confessions of an English Opium-Eater appeared in the London Magazine (1821), he wrote extensively for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (founded 1817 by William Blackwood), Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, and other reviews. Magazines prized hybrid forms—dialogues, memoirs, historical sketches, Gothic tales—encouraging cross-genre experiments that characterize this collection. Editorial personae such as John Wilson’s Christopher North framed lively debates on literature, politics, and metaphysics. The magazine economy, with its fast cycles and responsive readerships, made the essay a laboratory for historical interpretation, allowing De Quincey to braid antiquity, medievalism, political economy, and contemporary affairs.
Transatlantic print networks decisively shaped the late presentation of De Quincey’s writings. In the absence of international copyright until 1891, American houses routinely reprinted British authors. Yet Boston’s Ticknor and Fields, guided by James T. Fields (1817–1881), sought cooperation with living writers, issuing De Quincey’s Writings (1851–1855) with his revisions and securing authorial correspondence captured in pieces addressed to an American editor. Steam navigation on the North Atlantic (notably 1838’s Sirius and Great Western) and faster postal routes shortened transatlantic dialogue. The American and Scottish collected editions thus became instruments for retrospective ordering, textual correction, and renewed contextual framing of earlier magazine work.
Debates in political economy set the intellectual climate for many nineteenth-century essays and dialogues. Postwar Britain faced the Corn Laws (1815), distress in 1816–1819, the 1825 financial panic, and arguments over protection, wages, and value. Theories associated with David Ricardo (1772–1823), Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), and Jean-Baptiste Say animated the reviews, provoking popularization and critique. Questions about capital, rent, population, and monetary policy were not merely technical; they touched moral philosophy, social order, and national character. De Quincey’s dialogic manner, sharpened in periodical controversy, channels this argumentative milieu, using historical exempla and classical reference to interrogate modern economic certainties and their ethical entailments.
Philhellenism coursed through British culture in the 1820s, marrying classical education to contemporary geopolitics. The Greek War of Independence (1821–1830) mobilized British committees, subscriptions, and volunteers; Lord Byron’s death at Missolonghi on 19 April 1824 sanctified the cause. Reports from Chios, Navarino (1827), and the London Protocols (1830) moved readers schooled on Homer, Herodotus, and Thucydides, while the Elgin Marbles (arriving 1807–1816) reoriented taste and museum culture. De Quincey’s classicism, tempered by political skepticism, engaged the Greek question as a modern test of ancient ideals, probing how philology, Christian identity, and statecraft intersected in the making of a new nation.
Antiquarian and theological scholarship on paganism and prophecy had a robust eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century genealogy. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1776–1789) famously weighed the fate of oracles; patristic compilations and Plutarch’s De defectu oraculorum furnished classical testimony. German symbolists such as Friedrich Creuzer (Symbolik und Mythologie, 1810–1812) and English Platonists like Thomas Taylor reinvigorated allegorical readings. Oxford’s humanist training honed textual criticism, while evangelical and high-church writers disputed providence, miracle, and myth. De Quincey appropriated this apparatus to stage dialogues between skepticism and belief, excavating how classical religion’s rhetoric survived in modern imagination, and how Christian historiography reframed the voices of pagan antiquity.
Romantic medievalism offered a second historical archive. From Walter Scott’s Waverley novels (1814 onward) and Ivanhoe (1819) to antiquarian tours of abbey ruins, Britain rediscovered the Middle Ages in architecture, law, and legend. The Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–1541) left a national landscape of fragments later championed by A. W. N. Pugin in the Gothic Revival. Chivalric orders and secret fraternities, above all the Knights Templar—founded c. 1119, suppressed 1307–1312 under Philip IV and Clement V—returned as moral and political emblems. This climate made medieval institutions a laboratory for thinking about property, authority, conscience, and conspiracy, themes De Quincey explored with historical and imaginative range.
German literature and history supplied atmosphere and method. British readers absorbed Schiller, Goethe, and Jean Paul, while E. T. A. Hoffmann’s uncanny tales and the Schauerroman shaped Gothic sensibilities in the magazines. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), with its shifting sovereignties, confessional violence, and secret police, provided a richly ambiguous past for meditations on legitimacy and terror. That a major fictional piece appeared in 1832—year of the Great Reform Act in Britain and cholera’s first pandemic—underscored a Europe negotiating revolution and reaction since 1830. De Quincey’s Germanic settings thus mirror contemporary anxieties about surveillance, justice, and the unstable grounds of power.
Rural England was transforming under enclosure and agrarian capitalism. From the mid-eighteenth century through the 1830s, Enclosure Acts consolidated open fields and commons, altering customary rights and village governance. Laxton in Nottinghamshire, notable for preserving an open-field system under a manorial court, drew antiquarian attention as a living survival of medieval practice. Estates, entails, and guardianship shaped social mobility and domestic destiny, while the Court of Chancery’s delays became a national byword, later immortalized in Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–1853). De Quincey’s interest in country houses, priory lands, and inheritance dramatizes the dialogue between feudal remnant and capitalist modernity in the English countryside.
Industrialization and urban expansion reconfigured British life, from Manchester’s cotton mills to London’s teeming streets. Concurrently, opium—available as laudanum in apothecaries—was pervasive in medical and domestic practice. The East India Company’s entanglement with opium cultivation and the First Opium War (1839–1842) gave the drug imperial valences. De Quincey’s earlier Confessions (1821) set a precedent for combining psychic archaeology with social observation. That dream-inflected rhetoric, valued by magazine editors, animates his later historical sketches and speculative essays, where altered perception becomes a technique for reading ruins, archives, and economic abstractions, and for exposing the moral undercurrents of apparently neutral historical narratives.
After 1828 De Quincey lived largely in Edinburgh, a city whose Enlightenment legacy—David Hume, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart—pervaded its legal and intellectual institutions. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and later publishers such as Adam and Charles Black connected him to a vigorous Scottish press that prized polemic and erudition. Edinburgh’s courts, libraries, and conversation culture sustained his excursions into jurisprudence, political economy, and ecclesiastical history. The city’s topography of Old Town closes and New Town vistas, itself a palimpsest of medieval and modern planning, furnished an urban analogue to the historical layering that De Quincey practiced in essays ranging from classical antiquity to contemporary reform.
Nineteenth-century advances in philology and historical method reshaped how writers handled the past. Barthold Niebuhr’s Roman history (1811–1832) and Leopold von Ranke’s archival rigor modeled source criticism, while Franz Bopp (1816) and Jacob Grimm (Deutsche Grammatik, 1819–1837) made linguistic comparison a tool of cultural prehistory. Jean-François Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphs (1822) widened the evidentiary horizon for antiquity; Egypt, the Sphinx, and Near Eastern myths reentered European discourse with new authority. De Quincey, trained in Greek and responsive to German scholarship, absorbed these currents, using philology and comparative myth as scaffolding for reflections on prophecy, ritual, sovereignty, and the moral semantics of history.
Technologies of communication remade authorship and readership. Friedrich Koenig’s steam press, adopted by The Times in 1814, lowered costs and increased speed; stereotyping and later electrotyping enhanced reprint economies. Railways from 1830 onward compressed space, while Rowland Hill’s Penny Post (1840) expanded correspondence and the circulation of periodicals. Mechanics’ institutes, subscription libraries, and cheap reprints enlarged the audience for essays and dialogues. De Quincey’s habit of revisiting topics across years—antiquity beside current politics, medieval institutions beside economic theory—thrived in this serial environment, where ideas could be tested, revised, and repositioned as part of a long conversation with a national and transatlantic public.
By the 1850s, retrospective projects framed De Quincey’s oeuvre. In Edinburgh he prepared Selections Grave and Gay (1853–1860), while James T. Fields oversaw the American Writings (1851–1855), both gathering earlier magazine work with authorial revision and prefatory commentary. The mid-Victorian climate—Reform debates after 1832, the Great Exhibition (1851), the Crimean War (1853–1856), and the 1848 revolutions—encouraged moralized historical interpretation. De Quincey died in Edinburgh on 8 December 1859, leaving texts that traverse Greek independence, medieval survivals, Germanic statecraft, Oxford theology, and political economy. Read together, these volumes situate personal memory within the longue durée of British and European transformation.
Synopsis (Selection)
Prefatory Materials (From the Author to the American Editor; Explanatory Notices)
De Quincey outlines the aims, provenance, and editorial context of the collection, clarifying dates, motives, and the circumstances under which the papers were composed.
Memorial Narratives: The Orphan Heiress; Visit to Laxton; The Priory
Three interlinked reminiscences of country-house life and personal acquaintance that trace the fortunes of a young heiress and evoke the social textures, histories, and moral undercurrents surrounding the estates at Laxton and the Priory.
Oxford
An autobiographical sketch of De Quincey’s time at Oxford, portraying the university’s people, rituals, and settings while reflecting on youthful ambition, scholarship, and academic customs.
The Pagan Oracles
A critical survey of ancient oracular institutions that weighs classical testimony against rational and theological explanations and examines the causes of their decline in late antiquity.
The Revolution of Greece
A contemporary overview of the Greek War of Independence that narrates major phases of the conflict and assesses its political and moral implications for Europe and the Ottoman world.
Klosterheim (1832)
A Gothic romance set in a German city during the Thirty Years’ War, in which a tyrannical ruler is opposed by a mysterious masked figure amid conspiracies, disguises, and delayed revelations.
The Sphinx's Riddle
An allegorical, speculative essay treating the Sphinx’s question as a figure for the enigmas of history and human destiny, surveying competing answers through erudite examples and paradox.
The Templars' Dialogues
A series of witty philosophical dialogues that use chivalric personae to debate theology, metaphysics, and politics, blending satire with learned commentary on contemporary controversies.
Memorials and Other Papers — Complete
MEMORIALS, AND OTHER PAPERS, VOL. I.
BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY
FROM THE AUTHOR, TO THE AMERICAN EDITOR OF HIS WORKS.
These papers I am anxious to put into the hands of your house, and, so far as regards the U.S., of your house exclusively; not with any view to further emolument, but as an acknowledgment of the services which you have already rendered me; namely, first, in having brought together so widely scattered a collection—a difficulty which in my own hands by too painful an experience I had found from nervous depression to be absolutely insurmountable; secondly, in having made me a participator in the pecuniary profits of the American edition, without solicitation or the shadow of any expectation on my part, without any legal claim that I could plead, or equitable warrant in established usage, solely and merely upon your own spontaneous motion. Some of these new papers, I hope, will not be without their value in the eyes of those who have taken an interest in the original series. But at all events, good or bad, they are now tendered to the appropriation of your individual house, the Messrs. TICKNOR & FIELDS, according to the amplest extent of any power to make such a transfer that I may be found to possess by law or custom in America.
I wish this transfer were likely to be of more value. But the veriest trifle, interpreted by the spirit in which I offer it, may express my sense of the liberality manifested throughout this transaction by your honorable house.
Ever believe me, my dear sir,
Your faithful and obliged,
THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
CONTENTS OF VOLUME I.
EXPLANATORY NOTICES THE ORPHAN HEIRESS. VISIT TO LAXTON THE PRIORY OXFORD THE PAGAN ORACLES THE REVOLUTION OF GREECE
EXPLANATORY NOTICES.
Many of the papers in my collected works were originally written under one set of disadvantages, and are now revised under another. They were written generally under great pressure as to time, in order to catch the critical periods of monthly journals; written oftentimes at a distance from the press (so as to have no opportunity for correction); and always written at a distance from libraries, so that very many statements, references, and citations, were made on the authority of my unassisted memory. Under such circumstances were most of the papers composed; and they are now reissued in a corrected form, sometimes even partially recast, under the distraction of a nervous misery which embarrasses my efforts in a mode and in a degree inexpressible by words. Such, indeed, is the distress produced by this malady, that, if the present act of republication had in any respect worn the character of an experiment, I should have shrunk from it in despondency. But the experiment, so far as there was any, had been already tried for me vicariously amongst the Americans; a people so nearly repeating our own in style of intellect, and in the composition of their reading class, that a success amongst them counts for a success amongst ourselves. For some few of the separate papers in these volumes I make pretensions of a higher cast. These pretensions I will explain hereafter. All the rest I resign to the reader's unbiased judgment, adding here, with respect to four of them, a few prefatory words—not of propitiation or deprecation, but simply in explanation as to points that would otherwise be open to misconstruction.
1. The paper on "Murder as one of the Fine Arts" [Footnote: Published in the "Miscellaneous Essays."] seemed to exact from me some account of Williams, the dreadful London murderer of the last generation; not only because the amateurs had so much insisted on his merit as the supreme of artists for grandeur of design and breadth of style; and because, apart from this momentary connection with my paper, the man himself merited a record for his matchless audacity, combined with so much of snaky subtlety, and even insinuating amiableness, in his demeanor; but also because, apart from the man himself, the works of the man (those two of them especially which so profoundly impressed the nation in 1812) were in themselves, for dramatic effect, the most impressive on record. Southey pronounced their preeminence when he said to me that they ranked amongst the few domestic events which, by the depth and the expansion of horror attending them, had risen to the dignity of a national interest. I may add that this interest benefited also by the mystery which invested the murders; mystery as to various points but especially as respected one important question, Had the murderer any accomplice? [Footnote: Upon a large overbalance of probabilities, it was, however, definitively agreed amongst amateurs that Williams must have been alone in these atrocities. Meantime, amongst the colorable presumptions on the other side was this:—Some hours after the last murder, a man was apprehended at Barnet (the first stage from London on a principal north road), encumbered with a quantity of plate. How he came by it, or whither he was going, he steadfastly refused to say. In the daily journals, which he was allowed to see, he read with eagerness the police examinations of Williams; and on the same day which announced the catastrophe of Williams, he also committed suicide in his cell.] There was, therefore, reason enough, both in the man's hellish character, and in the mystery which surrounded him, for a Postscript [Footnote: Published in the "Note Book."] to the original paper; since, in a lapse of forty-two years, both the man and his deeds had faded away from the knowledge of the present generation; but still I am sensible that my record is far too diffuse. Feeling this at the very time of writing, I was yet unable to correct it; so little self-control was I able to exercise under the afflicting agitations and the unconquerable impatience of my nervous malady.
2. "War." [Footnote: Published in "Narrative and Miscellaneous Essays."]—In this paper, from having faultily adjusted its proportions in the original outline, I find that I have dwelt too briefly and too feebly upon the capital interest at stake. To apply a correction to some popular misreadings of history, to show that the criminal (because trivial) occasions of war are not always its trifle causes, or to suggest that war (if resigned to its own natural movement of progress) is cleansing itself and ennobling itself constantly and inevitably, were it only through its connection with science ever more and more exquisite, and through its augmented costliness,—all this may have its use in offering some restraint upon the levity of action or of declamation in Peace Societies. But all this is below the occasion. I feel that far grander interests are at stake in this contest. The Peace Societies are falsely appreciated, when they are described as merely deaf to the lessons of experience, and as too "romantic" in their expectations. The very opposite is, to my thinking, their criminal reproach. He that is romantic errs usually by too much elevation. He violates the standard of reasonable expectation, by drawing too violently upon the nobilities of human nature. But, on the contrary, the Peace Societies would, if their power kept pace with their guilty purposes, work degradation for man by drawing upon his most effeminate and luxurious cravings for ease. Most heartily, and with my profoundest sympathy, do I go along with Wordsworth in his grand lyrical proclamation of a truth not less divine than it is mysterious, not less triumphant than it is sorrowful, namely, that amongst God's holiest instruments for the elevation of human nature is "mutual slaughter" amongst men; yes, that "Carnage is God's daughter." Not deriving my own views in this matter from Wordsworth,—not knowing even whether I hold them on the same grounds, since Wordsworth has left his grounds unexplained,—nevertheless I cite them in honor, as capable of the holiest justification. The instruments rise in grandeur, carnage and mutual slaughter rise in holiness, exactly as the motives and the interests rise on behalf of which such awful powers are invoked. Fighting for truth in its last recesses of sanctity, for human dignity systematically outraged, or for human rights mercilessly trodden under foot—champions of such interests, men first of all descry, as from a summit suddenly revealed, the possible grandeur of bloodshed suffered or inflicted. Judas and Simon Maccabćus in days of old, Gustavus Adolphus [Footnote: The Thirty Years' War, from 1618 to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, was notoriously the last and the decisive conflict between Popery and Protestantism; the result of that war it was which finally enlightened all the Popish princes of Christendom as to the impossibility of ever suppressing the antagonist party by mere force of arms. I am not meaning, however, to utter any opinion whatever on the religious position of the two great parties. It is sufficient for entire sympathy with the royal Swede, that he fought for the freedom of conscience. Many an enlightened Roman Catholic, supposing only that he were not a Papist, would have given his hopes and his confidence to the Protestant king.] in modern days, fighting for the violated rights of conscience against perfidious despots and murdering oppressors, exhibit to us the incarnations of Wordsworth's principle. Such wars are of rare occurrence. Fortunately they are so; since, under the possible contingencies of human strength and weakness, it might else happen that the grandeur of the principle should suffer dishonor through the incommensurate means for maintaining it. But such cases, though emerging rarely, are always to be reserved in men's minds as ultimate appeals to what is most divine in man. Happy it is for human welfare that the blind heart of man is a thousand times wiser than his understanding. An arričre pensée should lie hidden in all minds—a holy reserve as to cases which may arise similar to such as HAVE arisen, where a merciful bloodshed [Footnote: "Merciful bloodshed"—In reading either the later religious wars of the Jewish people under the Maccabees, or the earlier under Joshua, every philosophic reader will have felt the true and transcendent spirit of mercy which resides virtually in such wars, as maintaining the unity of God against Polytheism and, by trampling on cruel idolatries, as indirectly opening the channels for benign principles of morality through endless generations of men. Here especially he will have read one justification of Wordsworth's bold doctrine upon war. Thus far he will destroy a wisdom working from afar, but, as regards the immediate present, he will be apt to adopt the ordinary view, namely, that in the Old Testament severity prevails approaching to cruelty. Yet, on consideration, he will be disposed to qualify this opinion. He will have observed many indications of a relenting kindness and a tenderness of love in the Mosaical ordinances. And recently there has been suggested another argument tending to the same conclusion. In the last work of Mr. Layard ('Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, 1853') are published some atrocious monuments of the Assyrian cruelty in the treatment of military captives. In one of the plates of Chap xx., at page 456, is exhibited some unknown torture applied to the head, and in another, at page 458, is exhibited the abominable process, applied to two captives, of flaying them alive. One such case had been previously recorded in human literature, and illustrated by a plate. It occurs in a Dutch voyage to the islands of the East. The subject of the torment in that case as a woman who had been charged with some act of infidelity to her husband. And the local government, being indignantly summoned to interfere by some Christian strangers, had declined to do so, on the plea that the man was master within his own house. But the Assyrian case was worse. This torture was there applied, not upon a sudden vindictive impulse, but in cold blood, to a simple case apparently of civil disobedience or revolt. Now, when we consider how intimate, and how ancient, was the connection between Assyria and Palestine, how many things (in war especially) were transferred mediately through the intervening tribes (all habitually cruel), from the people on the Tigris to those on the Jordan, I feel convinced that Moses must have interfered most peremptorily and determinately, and not merely by verbal ordinances, but by establishing counter usages against this spirit of barbarity, otherwise it would have increased contagiously, whereas we meet with no such hellish atrocities amongst the children of Israel. In the case of one memorable outrage by a Hebrew tribe, the national vengeance which overtook it was complete and tearful beyond all that history has recorded] has been authorized by the express voice of God. Such a reserve cannot be dispensed with. It belongs to the principle of progress in man that he should forever keep open a secret commerce in the last resort with the spirit of martyrdom on behalf of man's most saintly interests. In proportion as the instruments for upholding or retrieving such saintly interests should come to be dishonored or less honored, would the inference be valid that those interests were shaking in their foundations. And any confederation or compact of nations for abolishing war would be the inauguration of a downward path for man.
A battle is by possibility the grandest, and also the meanest, of human exploits. It is the grandest when it is fought for godlike truth, for human dignity, or for human rights; it is the meanest when it is fought for petty advantages (as, by way of example, for accession of territory which adds nothing to the security of a frontier), and still more when it is fought simply as a gladiator's trial of national prowess. This is the principle upon which, very naturally, our British school-boys value a battle. Painful it is to add, that this is the principle upon which our adult neighbors the French seem to value a battle.
To any man who, like myself, admires the high-toned, martial gallantry of the French, and pays a cheerful tribute of respect to their many intellectual triumphs, it is painful to witness the childish state of feeling which the French people manifest on every possible question that connects itself at any point with martial pretensions. A battle is valued by them on the same principles, not better and not worse, as govern our own schoolboys. Every battle is viewed by the boys as a test applied to the personal prowess of each individual soldier; and, naturally amongst boys, it would be the merest hypocrisy to take any higher ground. But amongst adults, arrived at the power of reflecting and comparing, we look for something nobler. We English estimate Waterloo, not by its amount of killed and wounded, but as the battle which terminated a series of battles, having one common object, namely, the overthrow of a frightful tyranny. A great sepulchral shadow rolled away from the face of Christendom as that day's sun went down to his rest; for, had the success been less absolute, an opportunity would have offered for negotiation, and consequently for an infinity of intrigues through the feuds always gathering upon national jealousies amongst allied armies. The dragon would soon have healed his wounds; after which the prosperity of the despotism would have been greater than before. But, without reference to Waterloo in particular, we, on our part, find it impossible to contemplate any memorable battle otherwise than according to its tendency towards some commensurate object. To the French this must be impossible, seeing that no lofty (that is, no disinterested) purpose has ever been so much as counterfeited for a French war, nor therefore for a French battle. Aggression, cloaked at the very utmost in the garb of retaliation for counter aggressions on the part of the enemy, stands forward uniformly in the van of such motives as it is thought worth while to plead. But in French casuistry it is not held necessary to plead _any_thing; war justifies itself. To fight for the experimental purpose of trying the proportions of martial merit, but (to speak frankly) for the purpose of publishing and renewing to Europe the proclamation of French superiority—that is the object of French wars. Like the Spartan of old, the Frenchman would hold that a state of peace, and not a state of war, is the state which calls for apology; and that already from the first such an apology must wear a very suspicious aspect of paradox.
3. "The English Mail-Coach." [Footnote: Published in the "Miscellaneous Essays."]—This little paper, according to my original intention, formed part of the "Suspiria de Profundis," from which, for a momentary purpose, I did not scruple to detach it, and to publish it apart, as sufficiently intelligible even when dislocated from its place in a larger whole. To my surprise, however, one or two critics, not carelessly in conversation, but deliberately in print, professed their inability to apprehend the meaning of the whole, or to follow the links of the connection between its several parts. I am myself as little able to understand where the difficulty lies, or to detect any lurking obscurity, as those critics found themselves to unravel my logic. Possibly I may not be an indifferent and neutral judge in such a case. I will therefore sketch a brief abstract of the little paper according to my own original design, and then leave the reader to judge how far this design is kept in sight through the actual execution.
Thirty-seven years ago, or rather more, accident made me, in the dead of night, and of a night memorably solemn, the solitary witness to an appalling scene, which threatened instant death, in a shape the most terrific, to two young people, whom I had no means of assisting, except in so far as I was able to give them a most hurried warning of their danger; but even that not until they stood within the very shadow of the catastrophe, being divided from the most frightful of deaths by scarcely more, if more at all, than seventy seconds.
Such was the scene, such in its outline, from which the whole of this paper radiates as a natural expansion. The scene is circumstantially narrated in Section the Second, entitled, "The Vision of Sudden Death."
But a movement of horror and of spontaneous recoil from this dreadful scene naturally carried the whole of that scene, raised and idealised, into my dreams, and very soon into a rolling succession of dreams. The actual scene, as looked down upon from the box of the mail, was transformed into a dream, as tumultuous and changing as a musical fugue. This troubled Dream is circumstantially reported in Section the Third, entitled, "Dream-Fugue upon the Theme of Sudden Death." What I had beheld from my seat upon the mail,—the scenical strife of action and passion, of anguish and fear, as I had there witnessed them moving in ghostly silence; this duel between life and death narrowing itself to a point of such exquisite evanescence as the collision neared,—all these elements of the scene blended, under the law of association, with the previous and permanent features of distinction investing the mail itself, which features at that time lay—1st, in velocity unprecedented; 2dly, in the power and beauty of the horses: 3dly, in the official connection with the government of a great nation; and, 4thly, in the function, almost a consecrated function, of publishing and diffusing through the land the great political events, and especially the great battles during a conflict of unparalleled grandeur. These honorary distinctions are all described circumstantially in the FIRST or introductory section ("The Glory of Motion"). The three first were distinctions maintained at all times; but the fourth and grandest belonged exclusively to the war with Napoleon; and this it was which most naturally introduced Waterloo into the dream. Waterloo, I understood, was the particular feature of the "Dream-Fugue" which my censors were least able to account for. Yet surely Waterloo, which, in common with every other great battle, it had been our special privilege to publish over all the land, most naturally entered the Dream under the license of our privilege. If not—if there be anything amiss—let the Dream be responsible. The Dream is a law to itself; and as well quarrel with a rainbow for showing, or for not showing, a secondary arch. So far as I know, every element in the shifting movements of the Dream derived itself either primarily from the incidents of the actual scene, or from secondary features associated with the mail. For example, the cathedral aisle derived itself from the mimic combination of features which grouped themselves together at the point of approaching collision, namely, an arrow-like section of the road, six hundred yards long, under the solemn lights described, with lofty trees meeting overhead in arches. The guard's horn, again—a humble instrument in itself—was yet glorified as the organ of publication for so many great national events. And the incident of the Dying Trumpeter, who rises from a marble bas-relief, and carries a marble trumpet to his marble lips for the purpose of warning the female infant, was doubtless secretly suggested by my own imperfect effort to seize the guard's horn, and to blow a warning blast. But the Dream knows best; and the Dream, I say again, is the responsible party.
4. "The Spanish Nun." [Footnote: Published in "Narrative and Miscellaneous Essays."]—There are some narratives, which, though pure fictions from first to last, counterfeit so vividly the air of grave realities, that, if deliberately offered for such, they would for a time impose upon everybody. In the opposite scale there are other narratives, which, whilst rigorously true, move amongst characters and scenes so remote from our ordinary experience, and through, a state of society so favorable to an adventurous cast of incidents, that they would everywhere pass for romances, if severed from the documents which attest their fidelity to facts. In the former class stand the admirable novels of De Foe; and, on a lower range, within the same category, the inimitable "Vicar of Wakefield;" upon which last novel, without at all designing it, I once became the author of the following instructive experiment. I had given a copy of this little novel to a beautiful girl of seventeen, the daughter of a statesman in Westmoreland, not designing any deception (nor so much as any concealment) with respect to the fictitious character of the incidents and of the actors in that famous tale. Mere accident it was that had intercepted those explanations as to the extent of fiction in these points which in this case it would have been so natural to make. Indeed, considering the exquisite verisimilitude of the work meeting with such absolute inexperience in the reader, it was almost a duty to have made them. This duty, however, something had caused me to forget; and when next I saw the young mountaineer, I forgot that I had forgotten it. Consequently, at first I was perplexed by the unfaltering gravity with which my fair young friend spoke of Dr. Primrose, of Sophia and her sister, of Squire Thornhill, &c., as real and probably living personages, who could sue and be sued. It appeared that this artless young rustic, who had never heard of novels and romances as a bare possibility amongst all the shameless devices of London swindlers, had read with religious fidelity every word of this tale, so thoroughly life-like, surrendering her perfect faith and her loving sympathy to the different persons in the tale, and the natural distresses in which they are involved, without suspecting, for a moment, that by so much as a breathing of exaggeration or of embellishment the pure gospel truth of the narrative could have been sullied. She listened, in a kind of breathless stupor, to my frank explanation—that not part only, but the whole, of this natural tale was a pure invention. Scorn and indignation flashed from her eyes. She regarded herself as one who had been hoaxed and swindled; begged me to take back the book; and never again, to the end of her life, could endure to look into the book, or to be reminded of that criminal imposture which Dr. Oliver Goldsmith had practised upon her youthful credulity.
In that case, a book altogether fabulous, and not meaning to offer itself for anything else, had been read as genuine history. Here, on the other hand, the adventures of the Spanish Nun, which in every detail of time and place have since been sifted and authenticated, stood a good chance at one period of being classed as the most lawless of romances. It is, indeed, undeniable, and this arises as a natural result from the bold, adventurous character of the heroine, and from the unsettled state of society at that period in Spanish America, that a reader the most credulous would at times be startled with doubts upon what seems so unvarying a tenor of danger and lawless violence. But, on the other hand, it is also undeniable that a reader the most obstinately sceptical would be equally startled in the very opposite direction, on remarking that the incidents are far from being such as a romance-writer would have been likely to invent; since, if striking, tragic, and even appalling, they are at times repulsive. And it seems evident that, once putting himself to the cost of a wholesale fiction, the writer would have used his privilege more freely for his own advantage. Whereas the author of these memoirs clearly writes under the coercion and restraint of a notorious reality, that would not suffer him to ignore or to modify the leading facts. Then, as to the objection that few people or none have an experience presenting such uniformity of perilous adventure, a little closer attention shows that the experience in this case is not uniform; and so far otherwise, that a period of several years in Kate's South American life is confessedly suppressed; and on no other ground whatever than that this long parenthesis is not adventurous, not essentially differing from the monotonous character of ordinary Spanish life.
Suppose the case, therefore, that Kate's memoirs had been thrown upon the world with no vouchers for their authenticity beyond such internal presumptions as would have occurred to thoughtful readers, when reviewing the entire succession of incidents, I am of opinion that the person best qualified by legal experience to judge of evidence would finally have pronounced a favorable award; since it is easy to understand that in a world so vast as the Peru, the Mexico, the Chili, of Spaniards during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and under the slender modification of Indian manners as yet effected by the Papal Christianization of those countries, and in the neighborhood of a river-system so awful, of a mountain-system so unheard-of in Europe, there would probably, by blind, unconscious sympathy, grow up a tendency to lawless and gigantesque ideals of adventurous life; under which, united with the duelling code of Europe, many things would become trivial and commonplace experiences that to us home-bred English ("qui musas colimus severiores") seem monstrous and revolting.
Left, therefore, to itself, my belief is, that the story of the Military Nun would have prevailed finally against the demurs of the sceptics. However, in the mean time, all such demurs were suddenly and officially silenced forever. Soon after the publication of Kate's memoirs, in what you may call an early stage of her literary career, though two centuries after her personal career had closed, a regular controversy arose upon the degree of credit due to these extraordinary confessions (such they may be called) of the poor conscience-haunted nun. Whether these in Kate's original MS. were entitled "Autobiographic Sketches," or "Selections Grave and Gay," from the military experiences of a Nun, or possibly "The Confessions of a Biscayan Fire-Eater," is more than I know. No matter: confessions they were; and confessions that, when at length published, were absolutely mobbed and hustled by a gang of misbelieving (that is, miscreant) critics. And this fact is most remarkable, that the person who originally headed the incredulous party, namely, Senor de Ferrer, a learned Castilian, was the very same who finally authenticated, by documentary evidence, the extraordinary narrative in those parts which had most of all invited scepticism. The progress of the dispute threw the decision at length upon the archives of the Spanish Marine. Those for the southern ports of Spain had been transferred, I believe, from Cadiz and St. Lucar to Seville; chiefly, perhaps, through the confusions incident to the two French invasions of Spain in our own day [1st, that under Napoleon; 2dly, that under the Due d'Angoulęme]. Amongst these archives, subsequently amongst those of Cuzco, in South America; 3dly, amongst the records of some royal courts in Madrid; 4thly, by collateral proof from the Papal Chancery; 5thly, from Barcelona—have been drawn together ample attestations of all the incidents recorded by Kate. The elopement from St. Sebastian's, the doubling of Cape Horn, the shipwreck on the coast of Peru, the rescue of the royal banner from the Indians of Chili, the fatal duel in the dark, the astonishing passage of the Andes, the tragical scenes at Tucuman and Cuzco, the return to Spain in obedience to a royal and a papal summons, the visit to Rome and the interview with the Pope— finally, the return to South America, and the mysterious disappearance at Vera Cruz, upon which no light was ever thrown—all these capital heads of the narrative have been established beyond the reach of scepticism: and, in consequence, the story was soon after adopted as historically established, and was reported at length by journals of the highest credit in Spain and Germany, and by a Parisian journal so cautious and so distinguished for its ability as the Revue des Deux Mondes.
I must not leave the impression upon my readers that this complex body of documentary evidences has been searched and appraised by myself. Frankly I acknowledge that, on the sole occasion when any opportunity offered itself for such a labor, I shrank from it as too fatiguing—and also as superfluous; since, if the proofs had satisfied the compatriots of Catalina, who came to the investigation with hostile feelings of partisanship, and not dissembling their incredulity,—armed also (and in Mr. de Ferrer's case conspicuously armed) with the appropriate learning for giving effect to this incredulity,—it could not become a stranger to suppose himself qualified for disturbing a judgment that had been so deliberately delivered. Such a tribunal of native Spaniards being satisfied, there was no further opening for demur. The ratification of poor Kate's memoirs is now therefore to be understood as absolute, and without reserve.
This being stated,—namely, such an attestation from competent authorities to the truth of Kate's narrative as may save all readers from my fair Westmoreland friend's disaster,—it remains to give such an answer, as without further research can be given, to a question pretty sure of arising in all reflective readers' thoughts— namely, does there anywhere survive a portrait of Kate? I answer—and it would be both mortifying and perplexing if I could not— Yes. One such portrait there is confessedly; and seven years ago this was to be found at Aix-la-Chapelle, in the collection of Herr Sempeller. The name of the artist I am not able to report; neither can I say whether Herr Sempeller's collection still remains intact, and remains at Aix-la-Chapelle.
But inevitably to most readers who review the circumstances of a case so extraordinary, it will occur that beyond a doubt many portraits of the adventurous nun must have been executed. To have affronted the wrath of the Inquisition, and to have survived such an audacity, would of itself be enough to found a title for the martial nun to a national interest. It is true that Kate had not taken the veil; she had stopped short of the deadliest crime known to the Inquisition; but still her transgressions were such as to require a special indulgence; and this indulgence was granted by a Pope to the intercession of a king—the greatest then reigning. It was a favor that could not have been asked by any greater man in this world, nor granted by any less. Had no other distinction settled upon Kate, this would have been enough to fix the gaze of her own nation. But her whole life constituted Kate's supreme distinction. There can be no doubt, therefore, that, from the year 1624 (that is, the last year of our James I.), she became the object of an admiration in her own country that was almost idolatrous. And this admiration was not of a kind that rested upon any partisan-schism amongst her countrymen. So long as it was kept alive by her bodily presence amongst them, it was an admiration equally aristocratic and popular,—shared alike by the rich and the poor, by the lofty and the humble. Great, therefore, would be the demand for her portrait. There is a tradition that Velasquez, who had in 1623 executed a portrait of Charles I. (then Prince of Wales), was amongst those who in the three or four following years ministered to this demand. It is believed, also, that, in travelling from Genoa and Florence to Rome, she sat to various artists, in order to meet the interest about herself already rising amongst the cardinals and other dignitaries of the Romish church. It is probable, therefore, that numerous pictures of Kate are yet lurking both in Spain and Italy, but not known as such. For, as the public consideration granted to her had grown out of merits and qualities purely personal, and was kept alive by no local or family memorials rooted in the land, or surviving herself, it was inevitable that, as soon as she herself died, all identification of her portraits would perish: and the portraits would thenceforwards be confounded with the similar memorials, past all numbering, which every year accumulates as the wrecks from household remembrances of generations that are passing or passed, that are fading or faded, that are dying or buried. It is well, therefore, amongst so many irrecoverable ruins, that, in the portrait at Aix-la-Chapelle, we still possess one undoubted representation (and therefore in some degree a means for identifying other representations) of a female so memorably adorned by nature; gifted with capacities so unparalleled both of doing and suffering; who lived a life so stormy, and perished by a fate so unsearchably mysterious.
THE ORPHAN HEIRESS
I.
VISIT TO LAXTON.
My route, after parting from Lord Westport at Birmingham, lay, as I have mentioned in the "Autobiographic Sketches," through Stamford to Laxton, the Northamptonshire seat of Lord Carbery. From Stamford, which I had reached by some intolerable old coach, such as in those days too commonly abused the patience and long-suffering of Young England, I took a post-chaise to Laxton. The distance was but nine miles, and the postilion drove well, so that I could not really have been long upon the road; and yet, from gloomy rumination upon the unhappy destination which I believed myself approaching within three or four months, never had I weathered a journey that seemed to me so long and dreary. As I alighted on the steps at Laxton, the first dinner-bell rang; and I was hurrying to my toilet, when my sister Mary, who had met me in the portico, begged me first of all to come into Lady Carbery's [Footnote: Lady Carbery.—"To me, individually, she was the one sole friend that ever I could regard as entirely fulfilling the offices of an honest friendship. She had known me from infancy; when I was in my first year of life, she, an orphan and a great heiress, was in her tenth or eleventh."—See closing pages of "Autobiographic Sketches."] dressing-room, her ladyship having something special to communicate, which related (as I understood her) to one Simon. "What Simon? Simon Peter?"—O, no, you irreverend boy, no Simon at all with an S, but Cymon with a C,—Dryden's Cymon,—
"That whistled as he went for want of thought.'"
This one indication was a key to the whole explanation that followed. The sole visitors, it seemed, at that time to Laxton, beside my sister and myself, were Lord and Lady Massey. They were understood to be domesticated at Laxton for a very long stay. In reality, my own private construction of the case (though unauthorized by anything ever hinted to me by Lady Carbery) was, that Lord Massey might probably be under some cloud of pecuniary embarrassments, such as suggested prudentially an absence from Ireland. Meantime, what was it that made him an object of peculiar interest to Lady Carbery? It was the singular revolution which, in one whom all his friends looked upon as sold to constitutional torpor, suddenly, and beyond all hope, had kindled a new and nobler life. Occupied originally by no shadow of any earthly interest, killed by ennui, all at once Lord Massey had fallen passionately in love with a fair young countrywoman, well connected, but bringing him no fortune (I report only from hearsay), and endowing him simply with the priceless blessing of her own womanly charms, her delightful society, and her sweet, Irish style of innocent gayety. No transformation that ever legends or romances had reported was more memorable. Lapse of time (for Lord Massey had now been married three or four years), and deep seclusion from general society, had done nothing, apparently, to lower the tone of his happiness. The expression of this happiness was noiseless and unobtrusive; no marks were there of vulgar uxoriousness—nothing that could provoke the sneer of the worldling; but not the less so entirely had the society of his young wife created a new principle of life within him, and evoked some nature hitherto slumbering, and which, no doubt, would else have continued to slumber till his death, that, at moments when he believed himself unobserved, he still wore the aspect of an impassioned lover.
"He beheld A vision, and adored the thing he saw. Arabian fiction never filled the world With half the wonders that were wrought for him. Earth breathed in one great presence of the spring Her chamber window did surpass in glory The portals of the dawn."
And in no case was it more literally realized, as daily almost I witnessed, that
"All Paradise Could, by the simple opening of a door, Let itself in upon him." [Footnote: Wordsworth's "Vandracour and Julia."]
