ment of Hyperion, the former god of the sun, by Apollo and incidentally of those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter, etc., and of the war of the Giants for Saturn's reestablishment - with other events, of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome.'

650. 4. Saturn, an Italic deity, supposed to have ruled in the golden age; he was identified with the Greek Cronus, father and predecessor of Zeus. See, also, 250. 509, note.

23. there came one. Thea, sister of Hyperion, one of the female Titans.

AUSTIN DOBSON: A DEAD LETTER

679. 11. Goldsmith's Madam Blaize. An allusion to Goldsmith's ridiculous poem An elegy on the Glory of her Sex, Mrs. Mary Blaize.

14. tea-board garden-maker. Apparently, one designing a garden on the scale of a tea-tray.

15. Dutch William's day. William of Orange's time, 1688 and after.

38. Tithonus. See p. 778 and note.

680. 52. Damson Jam. Jam made of the damson, or damask plum.

62. Padesoy, paduasoy, a rich heavy silk from Tadua.

63. the Vapors. See 666. 67, note.
79. Bonzes, images of Buddhist priests.
112. Point and Flanders. Lace.

JAMES THOMSON: MELENCOLIA

16. the pure sad artist. Albrecht Dürer (14711528), Nuremberg, painter and engraver. The sketch here described is one of his works on copper. 74. teen and threne. Sorrow and lamentation.

DE QUINCEY: CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM EATER

The version of the Confessions' adopted in the text is that of the original issue in the London Magazine (1821), which has been generally preferred, both by the critics and the public, to the enlarged edition published by De Quincey in his col lected works thirty-five years later. On account of his tendency to digression, De Quincey's second thoughts are sometimes less effective than his first. The additional details given in the later version have been used in the notes and are distinguished by quotation marks.

684. a. 1. an affection of the stomach. Opium is said to be a remedy for gastrodynia, or neuralgia of the stomach.

20. My father. Thomas Quincey, merchant, of Manchester, d. July 18, 1793.

50. and a ripe and good one.' See Henry VIII, IV, ii, 51-2. The master in question was a Mr. Morgan, of Bath Grammar School.

55. a blockhead. The master of Winkfield, a small private school.

b. 1. a respectable scholar. Mr. Lawson, head of Manchester Grammar School.

4.

College, Brasenose.

9. Etonian Up to 1851 the curriculum at Eton was entirely classical.

27. Archididascalus. Greek for head master. 685. a. 11. a woman of high rank, Lady Carbery. A young woman some ten years older than myself, and who was remarkable for her intellectual pretensions as she was for her beauty and her benevolence.'

(2) his dislike of the head master; (3) the refusal of his guardian to allow him to go to Oxford, as explained above.

b. 3. valediction, farewell. 21. towers of the old church,' now the cathedral of the modern diocese of Manchester. 49.pensive citadel.' See Wordsworth's sonnet Nuns fret not, 537. 3, and note.

686. a. 9. eighteen years ago, when De Quincey wrote the 'Confessions' about Christmas, 1820; really nineteen when they were published, the following September and October.

13. lovely

A portrait of an unknown lady, reputed in the school to be a copy from Vandyke (1598-1641).

22.- clock, the old church clock."

54-55. See Paradise Lost II, 306-7, p. 258. 56. Salisbury Plain, in Wiltshire.

b. 3. contretemps, mishap, unlucky accident. 25. canorous, resonant, ringing.

686. b. 27. the Seven Sleepers, seven Christian youths of Ephesus, who took refuge in a cave from persecution, and, according to the legend, slept there for 230 years.

32. étourderie, heedless, giddy behaviour. 35. Dr. The head-master at that time was Mr. Charles Lawson. In former editions of this work I created him a doctor; my object being to evade too close an approach to the realities of the case, and consequently to personalities, which (though indifferent to myself) would have been in some cases displeasing to others.'

50. with Providence my guide.' Paradise Lost, closing lines:

The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide. They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way.'

687. a. 16. lustrum, period of five years. 38. νυχθήμερον, a night and a day.

42. That moveth. See Wordsworth's Resolution and Independence, 529. 77.

44. Now, then, I was again happy. This was in 1816, the year of De Quincey's marriage, which induced him to suddenly cut down from 8,000 to 1,000 drops his daily allowance of opium. Instantaneously, and as if by magic, the cloud of profoundest melancholy which rested upon my brain, like some black vapors that I have seen roll away from the summit of a mountain, drew off in one week.' De Quincey began to take opium in 1804 as a remedy for 'excruciating rheumatic pains of the head and face'; but he did not become a regular and confirmed opium eater till 1813, when he was attacked by a most appalling irritation of the stomach.' De Quincey made repeated efforts to free himself from thraldom to the drug, which brought on severe depression and made him at times incapable of mental exertion, but he never entirely succeeded.

b. 3. Kant, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the founder of Transcendental' Philosophy.

22. Malay. There has been an inclination to regard this as a fictitious personage invented by De Quincey to give variety and color to his narra

tive; he himself protested that he had recorded the incident most faithfully.' He adds a note to the later edition: Between the sea-faring populations on the coast of Lancashire and the corresponding populations on the coast of Cumberland (such as Ravenglass, Whitehaven, Workington, Maryport, etc.) there was a slender current of interchange constantly going on, and especially in the days of press-gangs in part by sea, but in part also by land.'

28. a young girl. This girl, Barbara Lewthwaite, was already at that time a person of some poetic distinction, being (unconsciously to herself) the chief speaker in a little pastoral poem of Wordsworth's. That she was really beautiful, and not merely so described by me for the sake of improving the picturesque effect, the reader will judge from this line in the poem, written perhaps ten years earlier, when Barbara might be six years old:

'Twas little Barbara Lewthwaite, a child of beauty rare!'

De Quincey adds in an appendix that subsequently, when a young woman, she entered unconsciously into the composition of Wordsworth's Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Wordsworth, however, writing in 1843, when Barbara Lewthwaite was still living at Ambleside, says that she was not in fact the child whom he had seen and overheard as described in The Pet Lamb. Within a few months after the publication of the poem, it came to Barbara's knowledge, and alas! I had the mortification of hearing that she was very vain of being thus distinguished: and, in after-life, she used to say that she remembered the incident and what I said to her upon the occasion.'

688. a. 32. Anastasius, a novel published in 1819, and in 1821 both of high reputation and of great influence amongst the leading circles of society.' Its hero was a Greek who ate opium, and it included a glossary of the Oriental terms used in the story.

34. Mithridates, King of Pontus, was said to be able to speak the twenty two dialects of his kingdom. For this reason the German philologer Adelung gave this title to a universal dictionary of languages he published in 1806.

b. 29. a-muck,' Malay amoq, rushing in a state of frenzy to the commission of indiscriminate murder.'

32. intercalary, interpolated, intervening. An intercalary day is one inserted to make the calendar agree with the solar year, as the 29th of February in leap year.

32. happiness, i.e., opium.

689. a. 21. didactically, in the way of teaching, by direct instruction.

26. elixir, the philosopher's stone, which the alchemists imagined would confer perpetual youth.

30. a cottage standing in a valley. 'The cottage and valley concerned in this description were not imaginary: the valley was the lovely one, in those days, of Grasmere: and the cottage was occupied for more than twenty years by myself, as immediate

successor, in the year 1809, to Wordsworth.

Looking to the limitation here laid down - viz. in those days the reader will inquire in what way Time can have affected the beauty of Grasmere. Do the Westmoreland valleys turn grey-headed? O reader! this is a painful memento for some of us! Thirty years ago, a gang of vandals (nameless, I thank heaven, to me), for the sake of building a mailcoach road that never would be wanted, carried, at a cost of £3,000 to the defrauded parish, a horrid causeway of sheer granite masonry, for three-quar ters of a mile, right through the loveliest succession of secret forest dells and shy recesses of the lake, margined by unrivalled ferns, amongst which was the Osmunda regalis. This sequestered angle of Grasmere is described by Wordsworth, as it unveiled itself on a September morning, in the exquisite poems on the " Naming of Places." From this also- viz. this spot of ground, and this magnificent crest (the Osmunda) was suggested that unique line, the finest independent line through all the records of verse:

Or lady of the lake,

Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance.

Rightly, therefore, did I introduce this limitation. The Grasmere before and after this outrage were two different vales.'

689. a. 42. a witty author, Coleridge in The Devil's Thoughts:

He saw a cottage with a double coach-house,
A cottage of gentility!

And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin
Is pride that apes humility.

b. 21. The Castle of Indolence, by Thomson, Canto I, Stanza 43. See p. 373.

25. a high latitude, far north. Lord Dufferin's travels in Iceland are described in Letters from High Latitudes.

32. particular,' precise, exactly. De Quincey puts the word in quotation marks because this use of it is a Northern provincialism. 34. Mr.

'Anti-slavery Clarkson,' the author of a History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. 45. a Canadian winter. De Quincey seems to have been in earnest in this preference. At one time he thought of retiring to the woods of Lower Canada to devote himself to philosophic studies, and he had even fixed upon the situation for a cottage and a considerable library seventeen miles below Quebec. He gives the following reasons for this choice: My object was simply profound solitude, such as cannot now be had in any part of Great Britain with two accessory advantages, also peculiar to countries situated in the circumstances and under the climate of Canada: viz. the exalting presence in an under-consciousness of forests endless and silent, the everlasting sense of living amongst forms so ennobling and impressive, together with the pleasure attached to natural agencies, such as frosts, more powerfully manifested than in English latitudes, and for a much longer period. I

hope there is nothing fanciful in all this. It is certain that in England and in all moderate climates, we are too slightly reminded of nature or the forces of nature. Great heats or great colds (and in Canada there are both) or great hurricanes. as in the West Indian latitudes, recall us continually to the sense of a powerful presence, investing our path on every side: whereas in England it is possi ble to forget that we live amongst greater agencies than those of men and human institutions.'

48. fee-simple, a legal phrase for absolute ownership.

51. St. Thomas's day, December 21. 53. vernal, spring.

690. a. 10. bellum internecinum, war to the death. Hanway wrote an Essay on Tea (1756), which Dr. Johnson reviewed and condemned, declaring himselt a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, whose kettle has scarcely time to cool.' A lively controversy resulted. See Boswell's Life of John son (Macmillan's edition Library of English Classics), I, pp. -24-5.

27. a double debt to pay.' Goldsmith's Deserted Village, 466. 229-30.

46. eternal à parte ante and à parte post, from everlasting to everlasting, having no beginning and no end.

53. Aurora Hebe, beautiful Greek goddesses, the former the personification of Dawn, the latter of Youth.

54. dear M, Margaret, De Quincey's wife. b. 8. little golden receptacle, etc.,' quoted from the Anastasius mentioned above.

16. stately Pantheon,' a London theatre, so described by Wordsworth, near which was the drug. gist's shop from which De Quincey first obtained opium, as described in an earlier passage in the Confessions' not included in our extracts.

29. my body should be had into court, adapted from the wording of the writ of habeas corpus.

37. the Opium-eater's exterior. As was pointed out in the introductory biography, De Quincey's personal appearance was peculiar. Carlyle describes him as one of the smallest men you ever in your life beheld; but with a most gentle and sensible face, only the teeth are destroyed by opium, and the little bit of an under lip projects like a shelf.' 'Blue-eyed, blonde-haired, sparkling face.- had there not been a something, too, which said, ** Ec covi, this child has been in hell!"'' Professor Mas son writes: In addition to the general impression of his diminutiveness and fragility, one was struck with the peculiar beauty of his head and forehead, rising disproportionately high over his small, wrinkly visage and gentle, deep-set eyes.' The effect of his childish figure and odd gait was increased by his eccentricities of dress. His clothes had generally a look of extreme age, and also of having been made for a person somewhat larger than himself.' He was fond of list slippers for outdoor wear and sometimes forgot to put on one or both stockings.

48. categories, of Aristotle: 1 Substance or Being, 2 Quantity, 3 Quality, 4 Relation, 5 Place, 6 Time, etc.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY: THE

ROMANCE OF HISTORY

The article of which the latter part is here printed was professedly a review in the Edinburgh, May, 1828, of a new book by a popular writer of that day, Henry Neele, entitled, The Romance of History. England '; but this served Macaulay merely as an opportunity to set forth his own ideas as to how history should be written. He had stated the same opinions before in a review of Mitford's History of Greece, and he re-stated them in reviews of the historical works of Hallam and Mackintosh before he was able to put them into practice in his own History of England from the Accession of James II. In spite of his extraordinary aptitude for the undertaking, he carried out his scheme for only fifteen years of the century and a half for which the work was planned; no one man, even in a long life, could have executed the design with such a broad canvas and in such minute detail as Macaulay attempted. Much of the higher side of life was omitted, and many of his judgments have not stood the test of subsequent investigation. The modern historian aims at far greater accuracy as well as a more profound inquiry into causes; but no one has been more successful than Macaulay in writing a historical narrative of unfailing interest to the general reader.

'Ma

692. a. 7. Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, 163345, and the director of Charles I's ecclesiastical pol. icy. Curiously enough, the very faults of which Macaulay here accuses other historians have since been urged against himself, and Laud is one of the instances cited. Professor Montague says: caulay, who regarded this period of English history in a peculiarly partisan spirit, uniformly wrote of Laud's personal character with a loathing, and of his abilities with a contempt, unbecoming the gravity of a historian.'

11. Herodotus, the father of history' and the first important writer of Greek prose. Macaulay says of him earlier in this same article: 'Of the romantic historians Herodotus is the earliest and the best. His animation, his simple-hearted tenderness, his wonderful talent for description and dialogue, and the pure, sweet flow of his language, place him at the head of narrators.

He has

written something better perhaps than the best history; but he has not written a good history; he is, from the first to the last chapter, an inventor.' Fuller knowledge has proved that Herodotus is much more accurate and trustworthy than Macaulay here makes out.

41. Hume's History of England was published in 1754-61 and still retained its popularity in 1825, as Macaulay admits in his essay on Milton, in which he says that Hume hated religion so much that he hated liberty for having been allied with religion, and has pleaded the cause of tyranny with the dexterity of an advocate, while affecting the impartiality of a judge.' This comment Professor Montague describes as 'mere childish petulance,' adding that 'Hume sympathized with the Stuarts because he was a Scotchman and distrusted popular government because he was a sceptic.' The fact is, as Professor

Huxley points out in his essay on Hume, that Hume wrote history from the Tory point of view, Macaulay from that of the Whigs.

46. obnoxious, open, liable. Gibbon published his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776-88. It has stood the test of time much better than Macaulay's own work and has still a very high reputation for impartiality and accuracy.

49. Mitford, who died the year before this criticism appeared, published his History of Greece in 1784-1818. Macaulay had reviewed it with some severity in 1824, with the object, to use his own words, of reducing an over-praised writer to his proper level.'

b. 15. Plutarch (first century A. D.) wrote the Lives of 46 eminent Greeks and Romans, arranged in pairs so as to bring out contrasts of character and point moral and political lessons. Sir Thomas North's English version, made from Amyot's French translation of the Greek original, was the foundation of Shakspere's Roman tragedies.

15. Thucydides, the second great Greek historian (fifth century B. C.), wrote the history of the long struggle between Athens and Sparta which ended in the ruin of the former. Macaulay says earlier in this essay that Thucydides has surpassed all his rivals in the art of historical narration, in the art of producing an effect on the imagination, by skilful selection and disposition, without indulging in the license of invention.'

23. Calcutta Bombay both in India, but at opposite ends of it. So, it is said, English people coming to Montreal are charged with messages for friends in Vancouver.

24. Rollin and Barthelemi, French historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who in Macaulay's time had not ceased to be read. 693. a. 17. make the worse appear the better reaMilton of Belial in Paradise Lost, II, 112-4. See p. 255.

son.

24. the poet Laureate, Southey, who wrote excellent biographies of Nelson and Wesley, but no historical works of any value. His Book of the Church, Macaulay wrote a year or two later, contains some stories very prettily told; the rest is mere rubbish.' Southey was a copious writer of reviews and miscellaneous articles, in which he frequently attacks Lingard, who was a Roman Catholic. The latter's History of England (first edition 181925) at once became a standard work on account of its learning and insight; it is still held in high

esteem.

26. Brodie, author of A History of the British Empire from the Accession of Charles I to the Restoration (1822). In 1836 he was appointed Historiographer Royal for Scotland.

29. about to be reheard. Macaulay no doubt refers to the History of Greece by George Grote, writ ten with much more sympathy for democracy than Mitford's. It was not published till 1846-56, but the author began to collect materials as early as 1823.

37. neglect the art of narration. This was Macaulay's repeated complaint about the historians of his day; it was an art in which he himself ex

celled.