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THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
J^eatlj'flf (iBnglt^t) Cto0ic0 
 DE QUINCEY'S 
 
 JOAN OF ARC 
 
 AND THE 
 
 ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 
 
 EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 
 BY 
 
 CHAELES MAURICE STEBBINS, A.M. 
 
 TEACHER OF ENGLISH, BOTS' HIGH SCHOOL, 
 BROOKLYN 
 
 BOSTON, U.S.A. 
 
 D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS 
 
 1907 
 
J< 
 
 
 A 
 
 LIBRARY of COMGRESS 
 Two Cooies Rtjceived 
 
 AUG 28 »90^ 
 
 Oooyricht Entry 
 
 CLASS^^ AXc, No. 
 
 COPY B. 
 
 Copyright, 1907, 
 By D. C. Heath & Co. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A Sketch of De Quincey vii 
 
 The Romantic Revival in English Literature . , . xvii 
 
 JOAN OF ARC I 
 
 THE ENGLISH. MAIL-COACH . . . . . .47 
 
 Notes : 
 
 Joan of Arc 120 
 
 The English Mail-Coach 129 
 
A SKETCH OF DE QUINCEY 
 
 Thomas De Quincey, one of the most singular and, at the same 
 time, one of the most interesting personalities connected with the 
 annals of English literature, was born in Manchester, August 15, 
 1785. His long life, covering a period of nearly three-quarters of 
 a century, was a strange mixture of wild romance and terrible 
 reality. The ordinary conventionalities and responsibilities of life 
 never made any appeal to his eccentric nature. From a home of 
 plenty he ran away and wandered half-clothed, half-starved, and 
 ill, an outcast in the wretched streets of London. After spending 
 four years at Oxford, taking the written tests for his degree, he 
 disappeared mysteriously without presenting himself for the neces- 
 sary oral examination. He borrowed without remembering to 
 repay and lent without ever thinking of being repaid. A fifty- 
 pound note was no more to him, even as a grown man, than a 
 shilling, if the latter was sufficient to supply his immediate wants. 
 
 By nature this remarkable man was timid, sensitive, wilful, and 
 fanciful. His childhood was filled with weird fancies, extraordi- 
 nary sensations, and wonderful visions. In later years he could 
 recall incidents that occurred before he was two years old. One 
 of these he describes in his Autobiographic Sketches as " a remark- 
 able dream of terrific grandeur about a favorite nurse." Again he 
 tells us of the melancholy impression made upon him by the 
 muffled whisper that ran through the house on the occasion of the 
 death of his second sister. Four years later the death of his favor- 
 ite sister Elizabeth, who had been his constant companion, over- 
 whelmed him with gloom. That night he shpped away unnoticed 
 and stole upstairs where this gentle and best-loved being lay. He 
 stood awed in the presence of death, the meaning of which began 
 slowly to steal over him, and as he continued gazing at the angel 
 
 vii 
 
viii THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 face upon the pillow, a solemn wind began to blow, " the saddest 
 ear ever heard," and — 
 
 " A vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a 
 shaft which ran up forever. I, in spirit, rose as if on billows that 
 also ran up the shaft forever ; and the billows seemed to pursue 
 the throne of God ; but that also ran on before us and fled away 
 continually. The flight and pursuit seemed to go on for ever and 
 ever. Frost gathering frost, some sarsar wind of death seemed to 
 repel me ; some mighty relation between God and death dimly 
 struggled to evolve itself from the dreadful antagonism between 
 them ; shadowy meanings even yet continued to exercise and tor- 
 ment, in dreams, the deciphering oracle within me. I slept — for 
 how long I cannot say : slowly I recovered my self-possession ; 
 and when I woke, found myself standing as before, close to my 
 sister's bed." 
 
 While Thomas was still an infant, the De Quincey family had 
 moved to a country place near Manchester, and the lad passed the 
 whole of his youth in rural seclusion. The first country home, 
 which De Quincey describes as a "pretty rustic dwelUng," was 
 called The Farm. In 1791 or 1792 the family moved to a more 
 commodious country house, known as Greenhay, about two miles 
 out of Manchester. During these early years the shy and sensitive 
 boy was accustomed only to the society of girls and women. His 
 father, who was a well-to-do merchant, was compelled by poor 
 health to spend a large part of his time abroad, and his brother 
 was away at school. The boy's natural timidity and delicate health 
 made him averse to the sports of more vigorous boys. Conse- 
 quently even at this early age he lived shut up by himself in a 
 world of his own, a world of fancy. He loved nature, solitude, and 
 books. He was fascinated with the Arabian Nights, with certain 
 biblical narratives, and with narratives from history. 
 
 "When Thomas was about six years old, his education was in- 
 trusted to a minister of Manchester, and the lad had to walk to the 
 city every day to recite his lessons. Although this was not exactly 
 to his tastes, it was endurable to him, and he became well 
 grounded in Latin and Greek. But, for another reason, the two 
 
A SKETCH OF DE QCINCEY ix 
 
 years that followed were like a terrible nightmare to the boy. His 
 brother William, " whose genius for mischief amounted to inspira- 
 tion," returned home, and from the hour of his arrival to the day 
 of his departure two years later, Thomas knew hardly a moment's 
 quietude. This " horrid pugilistic brother," " the son of eternal 
 racket," was a lad whom the youthful Scott would have taken to his 
 heart at once, but to Thomas De Quincey he was an unendurable 
 tyrant. The brother was in continual warfare with the boys of a fac- 
 tory which Thomas had to pass every day on his way to his tutor's, 
 and the timid little creature was compelled to take part in the daily 
 battles. There were, besides, imaginary conflicts, hair-raising ghost 
 stories, and tragic theatricals that kept Thomas in a continual 
 state of terror. 
 
 The two terrible years came at last to an end; William left home 
 again. In 1796 the family household at Greenhay was broken up 
 and the property sold. Mrs. De Quincey moved to Bath, and 
 Thomas was sent to the grammar school at that place. Four years 
 later, although Thomas considered himself prepared to enter Oxford, 
 his guardians decided to send him to the Manchester Grammar 
 School for three years. They hoped that at the end of that period 
 he would be able to obtain a scholarship at Oxford. The condi- 
 tions, however, were intolerable to the freedom-loving boy, and he 
 decided to run away. He wrote to Lady Carbery — an accomplished 
 woman at whose home he had previously spent three months study- 
 ing Greek and talking theology — asking for a loan of five pounds 
 to add to the two which he already had. She generously sent him 
 ten. In his Cojifessions he tells of the careful preparations that 
 he made and of his fears lest he should be discovered as he stole 
 away in the early morning, with a volume of a favorite English poet 
 in one pocket and Euripides in the other. 
 
 His first intention was to make a journey to the English Lakes to 
 see Wordsworth, whom he held in reverence as a great poet. He 
 appreciated, however, the folly of presenting himself as a runaway 
 schoolboy before the object of his admiration, and after some con- 
 sideration decided to visit his mother. Through the intercession 
 of an uncle, he was given an allowance of a guinea a week and 
 
X THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 permitted to go on a tour of Wales. He wandered about from 
 town to town, from country-side to country-side, sometimes sleeping 
 in the best inns, sometimes in the cottages of the simple Welsh 
 peasants, and not infrequently in barns or among the ferns under 
 the open sky. 
 
 Even this free, romantic existence was too conventional for him. 
 He chafed under restraint and longed to be absolutely free; so he 
 decided to sever the remaining ties that bound him to his family 
 and his guardians, and work out his own destiny. Accordingly, all 
 communications with home ceased. He forsook his weekly allow- 
 ance, and, borrowing a few guineas from friends, set out for Lon- 
 don. He hoped to borrow money on his expectations of inheritance 
 and began negotiations with the Jews of London. But delay 
 followed delay until the last farthing was gone, and the young lad, 
 frail in health, was reduced to absolute want. He slept upon door- 
 steps until driven away by the watchman, and in vacant tenements, 
 partaking of the charity of others as destitute as himself. Finally 
 he was discovered by his friends, a reconciliation took place between 
 him and his guardians, and he was sent to Oxford. 
 
 He entered Worcester College in December, 1803, and kept up 
 an irregular residence there till 1808, his name remaining on the 
 books till 1 810. To Oxford he makes scanty reference in his writ- 
 ings. His life there passed so quietly that not much is known about 
 it. It is evident that he made little impression on professors and 
 fellow-students and still more evident that they in general made 
 little impression on him. Here, however, he became impressed 
 more than ever by the greatness of Enghsh literature, and undertook 
 a systematic study of it as a whole. To him it was a literature of 
 glorious movements, and now it was becoming glorious again through 
 Wordsworth and the disciples of Romanticism. To this new litera- 
 ture he turned with enthusiasm, and it was in response to this 
 movement that he, in later years, produced much of his best 
 work. 
 
 While at Oxford he wrote to Wordsworth expressing his admira- 
 tion of the poet's work, and in reply received letters which en- 
 couraged him in his desire to meet the author of the Lyrical 
 
A SKETCH OF DE QUINCEY xi 
 
 Ballads. His interest was growing, too, in Coleridge, who won 
 his admiration by his prose as well as by his poetic works. More- 
 over, Coleridge was a friend of the adored Wordsworth. In 1807 
 his long-cherished desires were fulfilled. He met Coleridge at 
 Bridgewater, and a friendship was formed that proved valuable to 
 both, a friendship in many ways remarkable. It was not long before 
 this friendship led to De Quincey's meeting Wordsworth and his 
 sister Dorothy. He spent two days in the Wordsworth home. 
 Two years later, when the poet moved to more commodious quarters 
 at Allan Bank, his old home at Grasmere was fitted up for De 
 Quincey. 
 
 It was during De Quincey's life at Oxford that he first took opium. 
 He was accustomed to visit London frequently. On one of these 
 occasions, in 1804, during rainy weather, he suffered intense pain 
 from neuralgia. A friend recommended the use of opium. He 
 followed the advice and purchased a small phial of the drug at a 
 shop in Oxford Street. The marvellous visions, the wonderful sen- 
 sations that resulted, caused him to enter upon a course of experi- 
 ments with the magic potion, and from that time he was never for any 
 considerable time without it. During his Oxford life he used to 
 make careful preparations for what he called an opium debauch 
 about every three weeks. The remarkable experiences with opium 
 during this period were, a few years later, depicted in one of 
 the most notable literary productions of the age. This work, The 
 Confessions of an English Opium- Eater, 2X once placed De Quincey 
 before the reading public as an unique literary figure, and assured 
 his success with his contemporaries. 
 
 His pecuniary circumstances improved during the last years at 
 Oxford, either because he had come into his inheritance or because 
 he had finally succeeded in borrowing of the Jews of London on his 
 future prospects. He was able to go and come as he pleased. He 
 spent much time in London, where he formed the acquaintance of 
 Charles Lamb. His favorite pastimes in the metropolis were attend- 
 ing the opera and wandering through the markets on Saturday 
 nights, a sohtary observer of the throngs of jostling men and 
 
xii THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 It was in 1809 that he removed to the Lakes, occupying the 
 Grasmere cottage that the Wordsworths had left. Here De Quincey 
 became an intimate companion, a close observer, rather than a real 
 member of the literary brotherhood that had made the English 
 Lakes famous, — Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. He filled 
 his house with books and settled down to a life of ease and study. 
 
 Something of his tastes and manner of life may be gathered from 
 the following description of his "den " by himself : — 
 
 " Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, and not more than 
 seven and a half feet high. This, reader, is somewhat ambitiously 
 styled in my family the drawing-room ; but being contrived ' a double 
 debt to pay,' it is also, and more justly, termed the library, for it happens 
 that books are the only article of property in which I am richer than my 
 neighbours. Of these I have about five thousand, collected gradually 
 since my eighteenth year. Therefore, painter, put as many as you can 
 into this room. Make it populous with books ; and, furthermore, paint 
 me a good fire; and furniture plain and modest, befitting the unpretend- 
 ing cottage of a scholar. And near the fire paint me a tea-table ; and 
 (as it is clear that no creature can come to see one such a stormy night) 
 place only two cups and saucers on the tea-tray ; and if you know how 
 to paint such a thing symbolically, or otherwise, paint me an eternal 
 tea-pot, — eternal a parte mite, and a parte post, — for I usually drink tea 
 from eight o'clock at night to four o'clock in the morning. . . . The 
 next article brought forward should naturally be myself — a picture of 
 the Opium-Eater, with his ' little golden receptacle of the pernicious drug' 
 lying beside him on the table. . . . No ; you may as well paint the real 
 receptacle, which was not of gold, but of glass, and as much like a wine- 
 decanter as possible. Into this you may put a quart of ruby-coloured 
 laudanum ; that, and a book of German Metaphysics placed by its side, 
 will sufficiently attest my being in the neighbourhood." 
 
 His companionship with the great poets was close. He read 
 with them, conversed with them, and rambled through the fields 
 with them. He frolicked with the children of Wordsworth, becom- 
 ing so attached to them that their grief was his, and when the 
 poet's little daughter died, he was inconsolable. Another of his 
 friends at this period was John Wilson, the subsequent " Christopher 
 North " of Blackwood's Magazine. With this man, who was about 
 
A SKETCH OF DE QUINCEY xiii 
 
 De Quincey's own age but twice his size and strong and manly in ap- 
 pearance, the little Opium-Eater used to go on interminable rambles 
 across country during the evening hours. De Quincey was inde- 
 fatigable both as a walker and a talker, and the Giant and 
 the Dwarf were mutually agreeable and instructive. 
 
 In 1816 De Quincey married Margaret Simpson, and for a time 
 limited his consumption of opium, which had become enormous. 
 The additional demands made upon him for money caused him to 
 think seriously of turning to literature as a source of income. He 
 aroused himself for a time, contributed a few articles to the maga- 
 zines, became interested in political economy, wrote some articles 
 on that subject, and then plunged again into the depths of opium 
 degradation and despondency. 
 
 Awakened again to the needs of his family, he went to Edinburgh 
 to find employment as a contributor to the magazines, but returned 
 without any definite prospects. In 1821 he decided to try London, 
 and his venture met with success. The September number of the 
 London Magazine contained the first part of the Confessions of an 
 English Opium-Eater. Popular favor came immediately. For 
 about seven years he contributed more or less regularly to this peri- 
 odical and to Kttighfs Qtcarierly Magazine. His contributions 
 were essays that dealt with English or German literature and philoso- 
 phy. It was during this period that he succeeded in getting several 
 articles into Blackwood's through the influence of Professor Wilson, 
 his companion of the Lakes. Among the first of these articles was 
 his fantastic piece, Murder Considered as One of the Eine Arts. 
 The years 1 827-1 829 were divided between Grasmere and Edin- 
 burgh, and in 1830 the family moved to the latter place. 
 
 The metropolis of Scotland was at this time a very interesting 
 place. The pleasant social activities that had attracted people to 
 Edinburgh for a century and more were still a characteristic feature 
 of the life of the picturesque old town. Through the influence of 
 Scott, and the great reviews established during recent years, it had 
 risen also to a place of considerable influence and importance as a 
 literary centre. There were many men of note — university pro- 
 fessors, authors, and jurists— who took a lively interest in affairs 
 
xii THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 It was in 1809 that he removed to the Lakes, occupying the 
 Grasmere cottage that the Wordsworths had left. Here De Quincey 
 became an intimate companion, a close observer, rather than a real 
 member of the literary brotherhood that had made the English 
 Lakes famous, — Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. He filled 
 his house with books and settled down to a life of ease and study. 
 
 Something of his tastes and manner of life may be gathered from 
 the following description of his "den " by himself : — 
 
 " Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, and not more than 
 seven and a half feet high. This, reader, is somewhat ambitiously 
 styled in my family the drawing-room ; but being contrived ' a double 
 debt to pay,' it is also, and more justly, termed the library, for it happens 
 that books are the only article of property in which I am richer than my 
 neighbours. Of these I have about five thousand, collected gradually 
 since my eighteenth year. Therefore, painter, put as many as you can 
 into this room. Make it populous with books ; and, furthermore, paint 
 me a good fire; and furniture plain and modest, befitting the unpretend- 
 ing cottage of a scholar. And near the fire paint me a tea-table ; and 
 (as it is clear that no creature can come to see one such a stormy night) 
 place only two cups and saucers on the tea-tray ; and if you know how 
 to paint such a thing symbolically, or otherwise, paint me an eternal 
 tea-pot, — eternal a parte a?ife, and a parte post, — for I usually drink tea 
 from eight o'clock at night to four o'clock in the morning. , . . The 
 next article brought forward should naturally be myself — a picture of 
 the Opium-Eater, with his ' little golden receptacle of the pernicious drug ' 
 lying beside him on the table. . . . No; you may as well paint the real 
 receptacle, which was not of gold, but of glass, and as much like a wine- 
 decanter as possible. Into this you may put a quart of ruby-coloured 
 laudanum ; that, and a book of German Metaphysics placed by its side, 
 will sufficiently attest my being in the neighbourhood." 
 
 His companionship with the great poets was close. He read 
 with them, conversed with them, and rambled through the fields 
 with them. He frolicked with the children of Wordsworth, becom- 
 ing so attached to them that their grief was his, and when the 
 poet's little daughter died, he was inconsolable. Another of his 
 friends at this period was John Wilson, the subsequent " Christopher 
 North " of Blackwood's Magazine, With this man, who was about 
 
A SKETCH OF DE QUINCEY xiii 
 
 De Quincey's own age but twice his size and strong and manly in ap- 
 pearance, the little Opium-Eater used to go on interminable rambles 
 across country during the evening hours. De Quincey was inde- 
 fatigable both as a walker and a talker, and the Giant and 
 the Dwarf were mutually agreeable and instructive. 
 
 In 1816 De Quincey married Margaret Simpson, and for a time 
 limited his consumption of opium, which had become enormous. 
 The additional demands made upon him for money caused him to 
 think seriously of turning to literature as a source of income. He 
 aroused himself for a time, contributed a few articles to the maga- 
 zines, became interested in political economy, wrote some articles 
 on that subject, and then plunged again into the depths of opium 
 degradation and despondency. 
 
 Awakened again to the needs of his family, he went to Edinburgh 
 to find employment as a contributor to the magazines, but returned 
 without any definite prospects. In 1821 he decided to try London, 
 and his venture met with success. The September number of the 
 London Magazine contained the first part of the Confessions of an 
 English Opium-Eater, Popular favor came immediately. For 
 about seven years he contributed more or less regularly to this peri- 
 odical and to Knighfs Quarterly Magazine. His contributions 
 were essays that dealt with English or German literature and philoso- 
 phy. It was during this period that he succeeded in getting several 
 articles into Blackwood's through the influence of Professor Wilson, 
 his companion of the Lakes. Among the first of these articles was 
 his fantastic piece, Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. 
 The years 1 827-1 829 were divided between Grasmere and Edin- 
 burgh, and in 1830 the family moved to the latter place. 
 
 The metropolis of Scotland was at this time a very interesting 
 place. The pleasant social activities that had attracted people to 
 Edinburgh for a century and more were still a characteristic feature 
 of the life of the picturesque old town. Through the influence of 
 Scott, and the great reviews established during recent years, it had 
 risen also to a place of considerable influence and importance as a 
 literary centre. There were many men of note — university pro- 
 fessors, authors, and jurists— who took a lively interest in affairs 
 
xiv THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 literary and political. This city with its one hundred and forty 
 thousand inhabitants had a strong interest for the great novelist who 
 was just drawing to the close of his career. What influence did it 
 exert over the retiring little Opium-Eater, the Englishman, the 
 dreamer, the lover of books? We shall see that it had very 
 little. 
 
 At this time De Quincey was forty-five years old. His tastes 
 continued to be what they had been since his youth. His chief 
 delight was in study and imaginative speculation. His large family, 
 now numbering eight children, made it imperative, however, for 
 him to exert himself in the production of an income. As a con- 
 sequence, these years were given largely to study and writing. The 
 social and political stir of Edinburgh held out no allurements for 
 him : indeed, his timidity rather led him to avoid all society except 
 that of a few select souls who were his intimates. These sought 
 him often, to enjoy the charms of his brilliant and impressive con- 
 versation. 
 
 During the first ten years of the Edinburgh period, the family 
 establishment was kept up in the town, and the little recluse, who 
 was doubtless the greatest literary figure in the city, came and went 
 through the quaint streets unnoticed and unknown. Few of the 
 inhabitants were aware of his presence in the city. This may be 
 accounted for in part by the retiring habits of the man, in part by 
 the fact that the affairs of ordinary daily life had no interest for him, 
 and in part by the frequent movings. So frequent were the changes 
 of residence during this period that it is now impossible to follow 
 them. 
 
 Although De Quincey was in many ways irresponsible as the head 
 of the house, he was a kind father and husband. He is described 
 as the gentlest of beings, incapable of saying a word that would 
 wound any one's feelings. He had a great affection for his children 
 and bestowed much time and attention on them. One of his 
 daughters relates that among her earliest recollections are the even- 
 ings she spent with her father in his study, where he would place 
 her in a chair and give her things to amuse her while he was writ- 
 ing. He took sole charge of the education of his eldest son, who 
 
A SKETCH OF DE QUINCEY xv 
 
 at the age of sixteen was proficient in the use of Greek metres and had 
 made an original commentary on Suetonius. Afflictions resulted in 
 the separation of De Quincey from his family for long periods during 
 the latter part of his life. The wife and two children, the youngest 
 and the eldest sons, died. For the sake of economy the remain- 
 ing children, six in number, rented a cottage at Lasswade, seven 
 miles from Edinburgh, and the father took lodgings in the 
 town. 
 
 The sorrows he passed through and the resulting changes in his 
 life increased the already pronounced eccentricities of De Quincey. 
 He became more absent-minded and incompetent than ever. He 
 was an omnivorous reader, and consequently collected papers and 
 books of all kinds. These he strewed about his lodgings, piling 
 them on the floor, in the windows, on chairs, and on the table, 
 where he reserved only a space large enough for his writing. 
 "When the room became so crowded that he could no longer move 
 about, he locked the door and engaged other lodgings, where he 
 began over again. This process he repeated several times. 
 
 About his dress he was no less careless. The following descrip- 
 tion by J. R. Findlay, to be found in Hogg's De Quincey and his 
 Friends, furnishes a good idea of the man at this time : — 
 
 " His clothes had generally a look of extreme age, and also of having 
 been made for a person somewhat larger than himself. I believe the 
 real cause of this was that he had got much thinner in those later years, 
 whilst he wore, and did wear, I suppose, till the end of his life, the 
 clothes that had been made for him years before. I have sometimes 
 seen appearances about him of a shirt and shirt-collar, but usually there 
 were no indications of these articles of dress. When I came to visit 
 him in his lodgings, I saw him in all stages of costume ; sometimes he 
 would come in to me from his bedroom to his parlour, as on this occa- 
 sion, with shoes, but no stockings, and sometimes with stockings, but 
 no shoes. When in bed, where I also saw him from time to time, he 
 wore a large jacket — not exactly an under-jacket, but a jacket made in 
 the form of a coat, of white flannel ; something like a cricketer's coat, 
 in fact. In the street his appearance was equally singular. He walked 
 with considerable rapidity (he said walking was the only athletic exer- 
 cise in which he had ever excelled) and with an odd, one-sided, and 
 
xvi THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 yet straightforward motion, moving his legs only, and neither his arms, 
 head, nor any other part of his body — like Wordsworth's cloud — 
 
 ' Moving altogether, if he moved at all.' 
 His hat, which had the antediluvian aspect characteristic of the rest of 
 his clothes, was generally stuck on the back of his head, and no one 
 who ever met that antiquated figure, with that strangely dreamy and 
 intellectual face, working its way rapidly, and with an oddly deferential 
 air, through any of the streets of Edinburgh, — a sight certainly by no 
 means common, for he was very seldom to be seen in town, — could 
 ever forget it." 
 
 The last period of De Quincey's life — that between 1840, when 
 the children removed to Lasswade, and his death in 1859 — was 
 divided between Lasswade, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. For long 
 periods at a time, he walked back and forth between Edinburgh 
 and Lasswade; at other periods, he spent his time entirely in his 
 city lodgings. He made long visits to Glasgow. In 1847 ^^ had 
 lodgings there, while he took part in establishing the Nor//i British 
 Daily Mail and in the transfer of Taifs Magazine from Edinburgh 
 to that city. Up to 1849 contributions by De Quincey appeared 
 with considerable frequency in both Blackwood's and Taifs. After 
 this date De Quincey contributed several articles, though for the 
 ii}Ost part of little importance, to Hogg's Weekly Instructor. In 
 1853 he began to revise his works for the Collective Edition. The 
 fourteenth and last volume of this edition appeared in i860, the 
 year after De Quincey's death. 
 
 De Quincey's merit as a writer had been recognized early in his 
 literary career; but it was during the Edinburgh period that he 
 may be said to have become noted. The little cottage at Lasswade 
 became the shrine of many literary pilgrimages; and many inter- 
 esting accounts have been given by visitors of this kindly little 
 man, with his eccentric ways, his impressive voice, and his remark- 
 able powers of conversation. 
 
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL IN 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 The emotional movement in literature during the first quarter of 
 the nineteenth century, known as the Romantic Revival, had its 
 beginnings a century earlier in the midst of the age of prose and 
 of reason; and, to understand fully this Romantic Revival, it is 
 necessary to know something of that way of thinking and writing 
 against which it was in the first place a protest and then a revolt. 
 
 The Classical Spirit of the Eighteenth Century. — With the Res- 
 toration in 1660 the classical influence over English writers became 
 dominant. The imagination and the emotions were put under the 
 ban, and reason took their place. Men no longer were influenced to 
 write because of strong emotions, but because their judgments, or 
 what they termed common sense, dictated to them. The result was 
 that they imposed arbitrary restrictions upon literature, and began 
 " To smoothe, inlay, and clip, and fit, 
 Till like the certain wands of Jacob's wit 
 Their verses tallied." — Sleep and Poetry, KEATS. 
 The heroic couplet was adopted as the true medium of poetry; 
 and within its narrow limits writers were to work out the ideals 
 of art, which were considered to be grace, wit, simplicity, restraint, 
 and perfection of form. 
 
 The restrictions placed upon the subject-matter of literature were 
 as severe as those imposed upon form. These restrictions, how- 
 ever, were as much a natural result of the tastes and social fashions 
 of the age as they were an outcome of deliberate judgment. Soci- 
 ety forsook the wonders of the natural world and the romance of 
 the Middle Ages, and centred its interest upon itself. And this 
 self was doubtless the most conventional, the most sophisticated 
 
xviii THOMAS DE OUINCEY 
 
 society that England has ever known. Pope expressed the pre- 
 vailing belief of his day in the line, — 
 
 " The proper study of mankind is man." 
 
 This study, moreover, became restricted largely to externals, to 
 manners and customs, the conventions of the day. The inner man 
 was a closed book, which the classicists had no interest in opening. 
 This study inevitably produced a mood — a way of viewing 
 things — and a method of treatment, foreign to average human 
 nature in most ages. Men became coldly intellectual and looked 
 upon the actions of their fellow-men, not with sympathy or any 
 kind of genuine human interest, but rather with the idea of apply- 
 ing the accepted standard and ascertaining how far short of it the 
 subject fell. The method, therefore, was analytical and critical; 
 and satire, social and political, was the most natural form of literary 
 production. One other natural consequence of this critical mood 
 was the loss of interest in the individual as such. Abstractions 
 and generalities about man as a class completely overshadowed 
 the importance of the individual man. The reaction against this 
 spirit was one of the most powerful forces, though not the first, in 
 the new movement which culminated in the first quarter of the 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 The Return to Nature. — The first sign of a reaction against the 
 spirit of restraint and conventionality was manifested at the time 
 when that spirit was most supreme. Pope had already brought 
 the heroic couplet to its highest perfection. Correctness, ease, 
 wit, and polish he had given it; nothing remained to be accom- 
 plished. Much of his best work. The Essay on Criticism, The 
 Rape of the Lock, the translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, had 
 appeared and taken rank, m the minds of contemporaries, among 
 the foremost productions of the language, when a young Scotch 
 poet named James Thomson published a poem entitled Win- 
 ter, which heralded the dawn of a new movement. His poem is 
 reactionary, both in subject-matter and in form. It forsakes the 
 conventional life of the city for the freedom of the country, and it 
 adopts blank verse in place of the heroic couplet. 
 
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL xix 
 
 Thomson's poem was published in 1726, and was followed bf 
 Summer in 1727, Spring in 1728, and Autumn in 1730. Although 
 these poems do not show any great personal passion for nature, 
 they give evidence of an intimate acquaintance with natural scen- 
 ery and natural phenomena that was in pleasing contrast with the 
 stilted nature fictions of the author's contemporaries. Thomson 
 was followed by a number of writers who wrote long didactic blank 
 verse poems on such subjects as The Excursion, The Chase, The 
 Pleasures of Imagination, The Art of Preserving Health, and 
 Sugar Cane. It was not long, however, before there grew up a 
 genuine sentiment for nature, which during the century found its 
 best expression in the poems of Collins, Gray, Cowper, and Burns. 
 This sentiment was combined with and influenced by a revival of 
 interest in the past. 
 
 The Return to the Past. — There were several ways in which a 
 reviving interest in the past was shown during the progress of the 
 eighteenth century. The first of these is the hold which the old 
 ballads and songs took upon public taste. Early in the century 
 several collections of popular songs and ballads appeared in England 
 and Scotland, the most interesting of these being the collections of 
 William Watson, an Edinburgh printer and bookseller. About the 
 time that Thomson was writing the Seasons, another Scotchman, 
 Allan Ramsay, brought out two collections known as The Tea- 
 Table Miscellany and The Evergreen. In 1723 appeared two 
 volumes of the Collection of Old Ballads, ascribed to Ambrose 
 Philips, and a third volume was added in 1725. Collections and 
 imitations of the old ballads multiplied from that period to the end 
 of the century. The public was aroused to a strong interest in this 
 old folk literature, with its naturalness of form, genuineness of feel- 
 ing, and the unconventional manners of people who lived in close 
 relation to nature. This poetry of spontaneous emotion is the 
 extreme opposite of the conventional poetry of the age of Pope. 
 Its influence continued into the nineteenth century. It is the same 
 spirit that actuated Scott in collecting the Border Minstrelsy and 
 in writing the best of his original poems, the same that led 
 Coleridge to produce The Ancient Mariner and Christabel. 
 
XX THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 Closely connected with this ballad revival was a renewed interest 
 in the olden times themselves, and especially in the great romance 
 period of European history. Everything pertaining to the Middle 
 Ages took hold of the reawakening imagination. Chivalry, the courts 
 of love, the Gothic castle, and the mediceval cathedral were of 
 absorbing interest. Poets celebrated the solemn music, the cloistral 
 glooms, and the aspiring arches of the mediaeval cathedrals; novel- 
 ists wove weird stories about the secret chambers and subterranean 
 passages of Gothic castles; and antiquarians interested themselves 
 in the trappings, armor, and weapons of the age of chivalry. 
 
 The third phase of this renewed interest in the past showed itself 
 in the revival of old authors. Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser, 
 who had suffered neglect during the years of classical supremacy, 
 came again into prominence. Not only were editions of their works 
 produced and reproduced, but a host of imitators, especially of 
 Milton and Spenser, did homage to these masters. One group of 
 writers adopted the Spenserian stanza, and some of them managed 
 to catch something of the spirit of the originator. Of Milton there 
 were two groups of imitators : one group adopted blank verse as 
 the medium for poetry and wrote dismal treatises; the other followed 
 the earlier manner of the Puritan poet as revealed in L^ Allegro and 
 IlPenseroso. The result was a company of versifiers sometimes known 
 as the "IlPenseroso School." This school affected melancholy, 
 seeking arched walks, twilight shades, cathedral glooms, and even 
 sepulchral vaults. In the nineteenth century this melancholy strain 
 found response in the heart of Byron. 
 
 The Rise of Methodism. — An influence which, though not per- 
 manently connected with literature, exercised a most powerful 
 influence upon it was the Methodist movement in England under 
 the leadership of Whitefield and the Wesleys. Reason had held 
 the same sway over religion that it had over literature. Spiritu- 
 ality had been crowded out and a strict formalism had taken its 
 place. The inherent religious and emotional nature of the English 
 people, however, could not be held forever in restraint, and when 
 the barriers gave way, England was swept by a great wave of 
 
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL xxi 
 
 emotional enthusiasm. The appeal of the Wesleys was directly 
 to the heart and conscience of the individual. He was made re- 
 sponsible, and through that personal responsibility he assumed 
 greater importance. The Methodist revival, therefore, was one of 
 the most powerful factors in the rise of individualism in literature 
 and in government. 
 
 The Spirit of Revolution. — Closely connected with the Methodist 
 movement is the growth of the democratic spirit, which is in itself 
 a revolution. The idea of human brotherhood and the dignity of 
 manhood were doctrines which the religious awakening had fixed 
 firmly in the minds of men. Abroad the same doctrines were 
 preached, though from a different standpoint, by Rousseau. The 
 rights of man, which may be said to have been the great passion of 
 the English people during their whole history, now assumed a new 
 interest. Men contended not only for their own rights, but for the 
 rights of others. Prison reforms were brought about, the death 
 penalty for paltry offences was revoked, slaves were freed, and the 
 condemned murderer no longer served as a holiday spectacle. The 
 revolutions in America and in France had a profound influence on 
 this spirit in England, extending to religious and political circles, 
 and pe'rvading also the literature of the period. Its influence is 
 marked in the poetry of Cowper, Blake, and Burns of the eighteenth 
 century, and in that of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley of the 
 nineteenth. 
 
 The Nineteenth Century. — The literature of the first third of the 
 nineteenth century was the outgrowth of these reactionary tenden- 
 cies which had been developing power during the whole eighteenth 
 century. The allignment of forces was not the same, and none of 
 the leaders of the movement represented all the eighteenth century 
 tendencies, but all the tendencies were somewhere represented. 
 The love of nature, the love for the old folk poetry, the interest in 
 the age of chivalry, the spirit of melancholy, religious sincerity, 
 emotional enthusiasm, the love of liberty and of one's fellow-men, 
 the intense realization of the importance of the individual — all 
 found a place in the poetry and prose of the early part of the 
 century. 
 
xxii THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 The Poetry of the Period. — This literary epoch may be said to 
 begin with the publication in 1798 of the Lyrical Ballads by 
 Wordsworth (i 770-1850). The volume contained a few poems 
 by Coleridge, among them being The Anciejit Mariner. Words- 
 worth set out with the purpose of being a reformer both in subject- 
 matter and in style. He chose incidents and situations from com- 
 mon life, believing that in rustic life " the essential passions of the 
 heart find fitter soil in which they can attain their maturity." 
 Many of his poems are on simple subjects and in very simple lan- 
 guage, but some of the longer poems, like The Prelude, and The 
 Excursion, deal with philosophic ideas, and are written in a rich 
 and stately language, though one entirely different from the con- 
 ventional phraseology of the early eighteenth century against which 
 he revolted. Wordsworth is the culmination of the nature lovers 
 of the eighteenth century. Combined with his deep insight and 
 sympathy for nature is the love of the simple manners of living 
 and the genuine emotions that we find in the old ballads. 
 
 Coleridge (1772-1834), the day-dreamer and the bookworm, 
 is remembered chiefly as a poet, although by far the larger portion 
 of his work is prose. His poetry belongs to his youth, and con- 
 tains the spirit and vividness of youthful fancy. In form, in quali- 
 ties of simplicity, directness, abruptness, repetition, and love of 
 mystery, it shows the influence of the old ballads. In Coleridge's 
 Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Ktibla Khan we have the cul- 
 mination of the romantic love of mystery which grew up under 
 the combined influence of the return to nature and the religious 
 awakening. Coleridge's style is like magic. As Lowell says, 
 "The most decrepit vocable in the language throws away its 
 crutches to dance and sing at his piping." 
 
 The third member of this group, known as the Lake School of 
 Poets, was Robert Southey (i 774-1843). He reminds one 
 much of De Quincey in his relation to these two great singers. 
 He lived with them, worked with them, admired them, but was 
 not of them. The volumes of verse which he produced, all on 
 romantic subjects, are tales of wonder, but they are not poetry. 
 He was a serious worker and did much in his day, but he is so far 
 
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL xxiii 
 
 eclipsed by his genuinely inspired contemporaries that posterity 
 thinks of him chiefly as a friend of greater poets. 
 
 While Wordsworth and Coleridge were writing their lyrical bal- 
 lads, ScoTi^ (1771-1832) was collecting Scotch ballads and trans- 
 lating romantic poems of German authors. He came before the 
 public in i8cK> with a border ballad, The Eve of St. John, In 
 1805 appeared The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The Lay had been 
 suggested by the Countess of Dalkeith, who sent Scott an old 
 legend with the request that he turn it into a ballad. The form 
 which the legend took, however, Scott says, was inspired by Cole- 
 ridge's Christabel. The romantic characteristics of Scott's work as 
 a poet are a passion for the old, for the ancient legends and tradi- 
 tions of his native land; a love of wild natural scenery; a prone- 
 ness to the supernatural; and a fondness for surprises and striking 
 situations. 
 
 Byron (i 788-1 824) rose rapidly to popularity, causing Scott 
 to turn from poetry to prose. Byron was by birth an aristocrat, 
 but in spirit he was a democrat, a revolutionist. He embodies in 
 himself and in his work all the wild, fiery passions of the individual 
 striving to free himself from the fetters of tradition and social and 
 political bondage. More than this, his life and work are colored 
 with the spirit of melancholy, which, worn as a cloak by many of 
 the eighteenth-century writers and inherited as a disease by others, 
 has now developed almost to a wild despair. 
 
 The works that raised Byron to the height of popularity are 
 The Giaotcr, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, and Para- 
 sina, a series of wild romantic tales in which the spirit of indi- 
 vidualism runs riot. The dashing, fiery style and the stirring 
 adventures which they recount appealed strongly to the people 
 of the poet's day. The Childe Harold recounts the pilgrimages 
 of the hero, and affords opportunities for fine descriptions of nature, 
 and for many poetic though melancholy reflections occasioned by 
 the ruins of the past. Byron's work as a whole reflects the revo- 
 lutionary movement of the age in which he lived. It is subjective, 
 wild, cynical, melancholy, worldly, and brilliant. 
 
 If Byron stands for the personal, self-assertive side of the forces 
 
xxiv • THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 of revolution, Shelley (i 792-1822) represents its ideals. He 
 was inspired with a noble passion for justice and peace. These to 
 him were obtainable only through the recognition of the laws of 
 universal brotherhood. An intense yearning for the betterment 
 of his fellow-men controlled his life. He was the son of an Eng- 
 lish baronet, and grew up under the influence of aristocratic sur- 
 roundings, but the spirit of the Revolution made a deep impression 
 on him. He was attracted by its theory, its ideals, and he dedi- 
 cated himself to its doctrines. 
 
 Shelley's first work of great importance was Alastor, a poem in 
 which he portrays the longings of a poetic soul toward its ideals of 
 beauty and truth. It is full of intense feeling and a deep apprecia- 
 tion of nature. This poem was followed in 181 8 by The Revolt of 
 Jsla77i, a long romantic epic in the Spenserian stanza, which depicts 
 the struggle of a youth and a maiden for freedom against a shadowy 
 tyrant. The Prometheus Unbound, a lyrical drama written in 1819, 
 is the noblest expression of faith in a new and better order of things 
 that the Revolution produced. 
 
 There is another side to Shelley's poetic gift that is not concerned 
 with the spirit of the age. It is his lyrical power. In this field he 
 has been unsurpassed. His lyrics are clear-toned and free, full of 
 sweet music and light, airy motion. They are the songs of a buoy- 
 ant heart and of a naturally reverent spirit. Nearly all of his long 
 poems are lyrical, but the genuine lyrics. Ode to the West Wind, The 
 Cloud, The Skylark, and The Sensitive Pla7it,zx^ the essence of song. 
 They take complete possession of the reader. Shelley's ^(^/(^w^zj-, an 
 elegy on John Keats, ranks with the great elegies in the language. 
 
 John Keats (1795-1821), the remaining figure of importance in 
 this group of poets, stands in many ways in strong contrast with his 
 immediate contemporaries. The spirit of social unrest, the reforms 
 that aroused his brother poets, the grave, perplexing questions of 
 the day, had no interest for him. He lived in an ideal poetic 
 world of his own. Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, and the 
 mythology of Greece and Rome were far more interesting than any 
 dream of universal brotherhood. He loved beauty, and that he 
 sought in art and in nature, and that he undertook to incorporate 
 
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL xxv 
 
 into his verse. As has been suggested, Keats turned to the past for 
 his materials and found them in the mythology of Greece and in 
 the stories and legends of the Middle Ages. Although he was 
 born and brought up in the city, he had a keen appreciation of 
 nature and found there forms of beauty that enchanted him. As 
 for his place in the romantic movement, he may be said to represent 
 the artistic revolt against eighteenth-century ideals. He has ex- 
 pressed his ideas on this subject most forcibly in one of his early 
 poems, Sleep and Poetry. Shortly before his death he said, ** I 
 have loved the principle of beauty in all things." This is the 
 principle that he preached and exemplified in his work. 
 
 "Beauty is truth, truth beauty; this is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." 
 
 Prose Fiction. — The great outburst of feeling which came at the 
 beginning of the century naturally found its best expression in 
 verse. The revulsion against the spirit of the previous century, 
 which, as we have seen, was an age of prose in both thought and 
 expression, led to the placing of prose below poetry, as a literary 
 medium; and even the prose of the new period is for the most part 
 dominated by the romantic spirit proper to poetry. Many of the 
 novels of Scott, produced from 1 8 14 to 1831, are the very breath of 
 romance. 
 
 When the enthusiastic readers of The Lay of the Last Minstrel^ 
 Marmion, and The Lady of the Lake transferred their enthusiasm 
 to their new idol, Byron, Scott turned his attention to a story which 
 he had begun several years earlier. This he finished and published 
 anonymously under the title of Waver ley. Its success was immediate 
 and striking. The result was that Scott devoted himself seriously 
 to novel writing, and there followed a series of thrilling stories, the 
 production of which is one of the most wonderful literary accom- 
 pHshments in history. These stories deal largely with the past. 
 Chivalry and the Crusades were topics that appealed strongly to 
 Scott's vivid imagination. Some of his novels deal with later 
 historical events, either on the Continent or in England and Scot- 
 land. Still another group, which may really be called novels, deal 
 
xxvi THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 with contemporary life, and depict real Scottish manners and cus- 
 toms. Such are Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of 
 Lammer77ioor, and The Antiquary. Scott is essentially a story 
 teller, either in prose or in verse, but in addition to this he is a 
 keen observer. Add to this the element of surprise, the love of ex- 
 citing adventure, and something of dramatic power, and we have the 
 qualities that awakened in his age and still awaken a strong interest 
 in the novels of this lively, strong-hearted, sympathetic man. 
 
 The novels of Jane Austen ( 1 775-1817) cannot be called romantic 
 in the true sense of the word. They are true portrayals of the 
 somewhat commonplace provincial life of her time. They are, 
 however, as far removed from the hackneyed conventionalities of 
 the eighteenth century as they are from the romanticism of Scott. 
 Miss Austen found pleasure in observing the simple happenings of 
 everyday life, and described them with minuteness and gentle 
 humor. The most widely read of her novels are Sense ajid Sensibil- 
 ity and Pride and Prejudice, which appeared in 1811 and 1812. 
 
 The Essay, — The novel was not the only form of prose to feel 
 the quickening influence of the new movement. The essay, which 
 had suffered a decadence since the days of Addison and Swift, took 
 on at this time a new spirit and a new force. Charles Lamb (1775- 
 1834), the first of the romantic essayists of this period, was one of 
 the most lovable men in literary history. His chief works are the 
 Essays of Elia, Specitnens from the Dramatic Poets, the Tales from 
 Shakespeare, and several critical essays. 
 
 Lamb was a school-fellow of Coleridge at Christ's Hospital; and 
 these two unusual boys found many sources of common interest, 
 which made them friends for life. The lives of both men were 
 sorrowful; Coleridge's through his own fault, Lamb's because of 
 circumstances over which he had no control. His sister Mary, 
 during a temporary fit of insanity, killed her mother. To this sister 
 Charles devoted his life, tenderly caring for her during the recur- 
 rences of her derangement. She was a genial spirit, with tastes not 
 unlike those of Lamb himself; and, although life for them was one 
 constant labor, it was not without its compensations. They saved 
 and shared, took outings, observed, studied, and wrote together. 
 
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL xxvii 
 
 Lamb delighted in the quaint, the unusual, the old. He loved 
 the old authors and the old customs. It pleased him to wander in 
 unusual places, to meditate upon buildings dim with the dust of 
 agesj to speculate upon their mysterious secrets. He enjoyed col- 
 lecting curios, odd prints, old books, and pieces of china. These 
 tastes Lamb shows in his choice of subjects and in his method of 
 treatment. He is no less romantic in the one than in the other. 
 His essays reflect the sweetness and quaintness of his nature, and 
 the courage and pathos of his life; and are enriched by a pensive 
 and delicate humor that is of the heart. The first of these essays 
 he contributed to the London Magazine in August, 1820. From 
 that time on an essay appeared each month for more than two years, 
 when they were collected and issued in book form under the title 
 of Essays of Elia.- The Last Essays of Elia appeared in 1 833, 
 about a year before the author's death. 
 
 De Quincey (1785-1859), the next one of importance in this 
 group of writers, was ten years younger than Lamb, and fifteen 
 years younger than Wordsworth, the object of his youthful adora- 
 tion. The fact that he was so strongly attracted by the poetry of 
 the new school of poets suggests something of De Quincey's liter- 
 ary temperament. He possessed characteristics which made him 
 love poets and poetry, and which led him to write his prose at 
 times in a style akin to genuine poetry. His imagination was un- 
 usually active and happy. He was endowed with the power of 
 seeing into the heart of things, of feeling the meaning of things. 
 Coupled with this was the power of portraying for his readers in 
 vivid and poetic forms whatever he saw or felt or dreamed. Aside 
 from the richness of invention, De Quincey shows his poetic feeling 
 in his love for mystery and his pathetic brooding over the sorrows 
 of human life. The first of these traits led him to love solitude, to 
 stand rapt in wonder in the presence of the sublimities of nature, 
 — the vastness of mountains or of the heavens, the roll of the 
 thunder, the flashing of the lightning, the calmness of moonlit 
 skies, the majesty of the ocean; the latter caused him to feel 
 sympathy for the outcast, the poor, the wretched. The first filled 
 him with a broad feeling ef religious veneration; the latter with a 
 
xxviii THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 plaintive melancholy. The one caused him to feel the mystery of 
 the natural world; the other, the mysteries of human existence. 
 As a result of these poetic characteristics De Quincey has left us 
 some magnificent examples of highly impassioned prose, often 
 styled prose poetry. 
 
 The reasons why De Quincey was not actually a poet are not far 
 to seek. As a matter of fact he tried to write poetry early in his 
 career, but found the restraint of versification uncongenial. His 
 attention was more concerned with the substance than the form. 
 Furthermore, in spite of a far-seeing and richly inventive imagina- 
 tion, his mind was naturally analytic. He loved to work out laby- 
 rinthine details, to trace a result back to its most remote causes, 
 to follow out the most minute effects of a trivial circumstance. It 
 made no difference whether he was solving a problem in political 
 economy, searching the depths of human emotion, pointing out the 
 significance of some historical event, or picking flaws in some one 
 else's reasoning. 
 
 The breadth of his knowledge is a striking characteristic of De 
 Quincey. In his choice of subjects he was restricted by no bounds. 
 He possessed a universal curiosity, and wrote upon remote and 
 obscure phases of history with as much confidence as he related 
 his personal experience in Wales and in London. Philosophy, 
 history, biography, science, theology, politics, literary criticism, 
 fiction, — all served as fields, or perhaps we may with greater 
 propriety say excursions, for his intellectual labors. 
 
 De Quincey's style partakes of the characteristics of the man 
 himself. Besides the charm of poetic feeling and vivid imagina- 
 tiveness, there is a warmth, a richness, and an eloquence to his 
 diction that is rarely equalled. His style is sometimes stately, 
 sometimes vivacious; it has beauty, and rhythm, and elegance. 
 
 Its chief drawback is discursiveness. The long digressions that 
 take us away from the main thread, just at the moment of intense 
 interest, often have the effect on our feelings that is produced by 
 the untimely close of a chapter in a serial story. These digressions 
 are generally the result of the author's desire to place before us all 
 the circumstances before he presents the case itself. He leads the 
 
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL xxix 
 
 reader along one train of thought almost to the significant point 
 and then returns to bring him up to the same place by another 
 way. This, together with his love of minute details, has caused 
 De Quincey to be called loquacious. His life was, as he himself 
 often said, an intellectual one; he lived mostly with his books, his 
 dreams, and his theories; and about these, which were a part of 
 himself, he liked to talk. 
 
 Like Lamb, De Quincey sees the humorous side of things as well 
 as the serious; but, unlike Lamb, he often allows his humor to 
 become extravagant and sometimes spiteful. He is never so seri- 
 ous that he passes over an opportunity for a little fun, never so 
 interested in a discussion that he cannot pause to play a joke on 
 an imagined opponent. The most extravagant outbursts of humor 
 are to be found in Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. 
 In his controversial writings De Quincey's humor sometimes is 
 of such a mischievous character that it is difficult to distinguish it 
 from malevolence; yet it is hardly that. It is rather a delight in 
 turning the tables on an opponent and then enjoying, in a good- 
 natured way, the latter's discomfiture. This, it must be remem- 
 bered, too, was an intellectual, not an actual, delight. De Quincey 
 as a man evidently revelled in this sort of inner merriment. Closely 
 associated with this humor is a pathos, which is just as deep and 
 affecting and no less a part of the man and the writer. 
 
 The Reviews. — English prose received something of an impetus 
 through the establishment, in the early part of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, of the great critical reviews. The Edinburgh Review was 
 founded in 1802 by several prominent young Liberals; The 
 Quarterly, a Tory organ, followed in 1808; and Blackwood's in 
 1817. All of these were Scottish. The first English review of 
 importance was the Westmitister, not established till 1824. Al- 
 though these periodicals were founded chiefly for political pur- 
 poses, they exercised a considerable influence over literature. It 
 was an influence, however, largely antagonistic to the literary 
 movement of the time. They stood as the last bulwarks of the 
 old poetic ideas and theories. The criticism was autocratic and 
 personal. Instead of making a careful examination and evalua- 
 
XXX THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 tion of the books reviewed, the writers either praised or con- 
 demned unsparingly; and, not content with the harsh assertions 
 about works that were not to their taste, they heaped abuse 
 upon the authors. Their bitterest attacks were upon the poets. 
 Scarcely one of prominence escaped from Wordsworth to Tenny- 
 son. Coleridge says, in the Biographia Liieraria^ that he con- 
 siders a large share of his popularity due to the attacks made upon 
 him by the reviewers. Byron characterized a similar attack of the 
 reviewers upon himself as " a masterpiece of low wit, a tissue of 
 scurrilous abuse," and in response wrote his satirical poem, Eng* 
 lish Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Shelley, in his Adonais, lashes 
 the reviewers for their harshness to John Keats. 
 
 The best critical writings that appeared in the reviews dealt with 
 the old authors. It was through the channels of these periodicals 
 that the best of the critical works of Lamb, De Quincey, Hazlitt, 
 Carlyle, and Macaulay found their way to the public. 
 
JOAN OF ARC 
 
JOAN OF ARC^ 
 
 1. What is to be thought of her? What is to be 
 thought of the poor shepherd girl from the hills and 
 forests of Lorraine, that — Hke the Hebrew shepherd 
 boy ° from the hills and forests of Judea — rose suddenly 
 out of the quiet, out of the safety, out of the religious 
 inspiration, rooted in deep pastoral soUtudes, to a station 
 in the van of armies, and to the more perilous station at 
 the right hand of kings ? The Hebrew boy inaugurated 
 his patriotic mission by an act, by a victorious act, such 
 as no man could deny. But so did the girl of Lorraine, 
 
 i"y4rc" .• — Modern France, that should know a great deal better 
 than myself, insists that the name is not D'Arc — «>., of Arc — but 
 Dare. Now it happens sometimes that, if a person whose position 
 guarantees his access to the best information will content himself with 
 gloomy dogmatism, striking the table with his fist, and saying in a 
 terrific voice, " It is so, and there's an end of it," one bows deferentially, 
 and submits. But, if, unhappily for himself, won by this docility, he 
 relents too amiably into reasons and arguments, probably one raises an 
 insurrection against him that may never be crushed ; for in the fields of 
 logic one can skirmish, perhaps, as well as he. Had he confined him- 
 self to dogmatism, he would have intrenched his position in darkness, 
 and have hidden his own vulnerable points. But coming down to base 
 reasons he lets in light, and one sees where to plant the blows. Now, 
 the worshipful reason of modern France for disturbing the old, 
 received spelling is that Jean Hordal, a descendant of La Pucelle's 
 brother, spelled the name Dare in 1612. But what of that ? It is noto- 
 rious that what small matter of spelling Providence had thought fit to 
 disburse amongst man in the seventeenth century was all monopolised 
 by printers ; now, M. Hordal was not a printer. 
 
 3 
 
4 THOMAS DE OUINCEY 
 
 if we read her story as it was read by those who saw her 
 nearest. Adverse armies bore witness to the boy as no 
 pretender ; but so they did to the gentle girl. Judged 
 by the voices of all who saw them/r^/;z a station of good 
 will, both were found true and loyal to any promises 
 involved in their first acts. Enemies it was that made 
 the difference between their subsequent fortunes. The 
 boy rose to a splendour and a noonday prosperity, both 
 personal and pubHc, that rang through the records of his 
 people, and became a byword among his posterity for a 
 thousand years, until the sceptre was departing from 
 Judah. The poor, forsaken girl, on the contrary, drank 
 not herself from that cup of rest which she had secured 
 for France. She never sang together with the songs that 
 rose in her native Domremy as echoes to the departing 
 steps of invaders. She mingled not in the festal dances 
 of Vaucouleurs° which celebrated in rapture the redemp- 
 tion of France. No ! for her voice was then silent ; no ! 
 for her feet were dust. Pure, innocent, noble-hearted 
 girl ! whom, from earliest youth, ever I beheved in as 
 full of truth and self-sacrifice, this was amongst the 
 strongest pledges for thy truth, that never once — no, not 
 for a moment of weakness — didst thou revel in the vision 
 of coronets and honour from man. Coronets for thee ! 
 Oh, no ! Honours, if they come when all is over, are 
 for those that share thy blood.^ Daughter of Domremy, 
 when the gratitude of thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be 
 sleeping the sleep of the dead. Call her. King of France, 
 but she will not hear thee. Cite her by the apparitors ° 
 
 1 " Those that share thy blood" : — A collateral relative of Joanna's 
 was subsequently ennobled by the title of Du Lys, 
 
FROM THE STATUE BY CHAPU 
 
 JOAN OF ARC AT DO MR KM V 
 
JOAN OF ARC 5 
 
 to come and receive a robe of honour, but she will be 
 found en contumace^ When the thunders of universal 
 France, as even yet may happen,° shall proclaim the 
 grandeur of the poor shepherd girl that gave up all for 
 her country, thy ear, young shepherd girl, will have been 
 deaf for five centuries. To suffer and to do, that was thy 
 portion in this life ; that was thy destiny ; and not for a 
 moment was it hidden from thyself. Life, thou saidst, is 
 short ; and the sleep which is in the grave is long ; let 
 me use that life, so transitory, for the glory of those 
 heavenly dreams destined to comfort the sleep which is 
 so long ! This pure creature — pure from every suspicion 
 of even a visionary self-interest, even as she was pure in 
 senses more obvious — never once did this holy child, as 
 regarded herself, relax from her belief in the darkness 
 that was traveUing to meet her. She might not prefigure 
 the very manner of her death ; she saw not in vision, 
 perhaps, the aerial altitude of the fiery scaffold, the spec- 
 tators without end, on every road, pouring into Rouen as 
 to a coronation, the surging smoke, the volleying flames, 
 the hostile faces all around, the pitying eye that lurked 
 but here and there, until nature and imperishable truth 
 broke loose from artificial restraints — these might not be 
 apparent through the mists of the hurrying future. But 
 the voice that called her to death, that she heard for 
 ever. 
 
 2. Great was the throne of France ° even in those days, 
 and great was he that sat upon it ; but well Joanna knew 
 that not the throne, nor he that sat upon it, was for her ; 
 but, on the contrary, that she was for them ; not she by 
 them, but they by her, should rise from the dust. Gor- 
 
6 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 geous were the lilies of France," and for centuries had the 
 privilege to spread their beauty over land and sea, until, 
 in another century, the wrath of God and man combined 
 to wither them ; ° but well Joanna knew, early at 
 Domremy she had read that bitter truth, that the lilies 
 of France would decorate no garland for /ler. Flower 
 nor bud, bell nor blossom, would ever bloom for 
 
 3. But stay. What reason is there taking up this sub- 
 ject of Joanna precisely in the spring of 1847? Might 
 it not have been left till the spring of 1947, or, perhaps, 
 left till called for? Yes, but it is called for, and clamor- 
 ously. You are aware, reader, that amongst the many 
 original thinkers whom modern France has produced, 
 one of the reputed leaders is M. Michelet.^ All these 
 writers are of a revolutionary cast ; ° not in a pohtical 
 sense merely, but in all senses ; mad, oftentimes, as 
 March hares ; crazy with the laughing gas of recovered 
 liberty ; ° drunk with the wine cup of their mighty Revo- 
 lution, snorting, whinnying, throwing up their heels, hke 
 wild horses in the boundless pampas, and running races 
 of defiance with snipes, or with the winds, or with their 
 own shadows, if they can find nothing else to challenge. 
 Some time or other, I, that have leisure to read, may in- 
 troduce you, that have not, to two or three dozen of these 
 writers ; of whom I can assure you beforehand that they 
 are often profound, and at intervals are even as impas- 
 sioned as if they were come of our best English blood. 
 But now, confining our attention to M. Michelet, we in 
 England — who know him best by his worst book, the 
 book against priests,° etc. — know him disadvantageously. 
 
JOAN OF ARC 7 
 
 That book is a rhapsody of incoherence. But his 
 " History of France " is quite another thing, A man, 
 in whatsoever craft he sails, cannot stretch away out of 
 sight when he is Hnked to the windings of the shore by 
 towing-ropes of History. Facts, and the consequences 
 of facts, draw the writer back to the falconer's lure from 
 the giddiest heights of speculation. Here, therefore — 
 in his " France " — if not always free from flightiness, if 
 now and then off like a rocket for an airy wheel in the 
 clouds, M. Michelet, with natural politeness, never forgets 
 that he has left a large audience waiting for him on earth, 
 and gazing upward in anxiety for his return; return, 
 therefore, he does. But History, though clear of certain 
 temptations in one direction, has separate dangers of its 
 own. It is impossible so to write a history of France, or 
 of England — works becoming every hour more indis- 
 pensable to the inevitably poHtical man of this day — 
 without perilous openings for error. If I, for instance, 
 on the part of England, should happen to turn my la- 
 bours into that channel, and (on the model of Lord Percy 
 going to Chevy Chase °) 
 
 " A vow to God should make 
 
 My pleasure in the Michelet woods 
 Three summer days to take," 
 
 probably, from simple delirium, I might hunt M. Michelet 
 into delirium tremens. Two strong angels stand by the 
 side of History, whether French history or English, as 
 heraldic supporters : the angel of research on the left 
 hand, that must read milhons of dusty parchments, and 
 of pages blotted with Ues ; the angel of meditation on 
 
8 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 the right hand, that must cleanse these lying records with 
 fire, even as of old the draperies of asbestos were 
 cleansed,° and must quicken them into regenerated life. 
 Willingly I acknowledge that no man will ever avoid in- 
 numerable errors of detail; with so vast a compass of 
 ground to traverse, this is impossible ; but such errors 
 (though I have a bushel on hand, at M. Michelet's ser- 
 vice) are not the game I chase ; it is the bitter and un- 
 fair spirit in which M. Michelet writes against England. 
 Even that, after all, is but my secondary object; the real 
 one is Joanna, the Pucelle d 'Orleans herself. 
 
 4. I am not going to write the history of La Pucelle : ° to 
 do this, or even circumstantially to report the history of 
 her persecution and bitter death, of her struggle with 
 false witnesses and with ensnaring judges, it would be 
 necessary to have before us all the documents," and there- 
 fore the collection ° only now forthcoming in Paris.^ But 
 my purpose is narrower. There have been great thinkers, 
 disdaining the careless judgments of contemporaries, who 
 have thrown themselves boldly on the judgment of a far 
 posterity, that should have had time to review, to ponder, 
 to compare. There have been great actors on the stage 
 of tragic humanity that might, with the same depth of 
 confidence, have appealed from the levity of compatriot 
 friends — too heartless for the subUme interest of their 
 story, and too impatient for the labour of sifting its per- 
 plexities — to the magnanimity and justice of enemies. 
 To this class belongs the Maid of Arc. The ancient 
 
 1" Only now forthcoming" : — In 1847 began the publication (from 
 official records) of Joanna's trial. It was interrupted, I fear, by the con- 
 vulsions of 1848 ; and whether even yet finished I do not know. 
 
JOAN OF ARC 9 
 
 Romans were too faithful to the ideal of grandeur in 
 themselves not to relent, after a generation or two, before 
 the grandeur of Hannibal.° Mithridates,° a more doubt- 
 ful person, yet, merely for the magic perseverance of his 
 indomitable malice, won from the same Romans the only 
 real honour that ever he received on earth. And we 
 Enghsh have ever shown the same homage to stubborn 
 enmity. To work unflinchingly for the ruin of England ; 
 to say through life, by word and by deed, Delenda est 
 Anglia Victrix!° — that one purpose of malice, faithfully 
 pursued, has quartered some people upon our national 
 funds of homage as by a perpetual annuity. Better than 
 an inheritance of service rendered to England herself has 
 sometimes proved the most insane hatred to England. 
 Hyder Ali,° even his son Tippoo, though so far inferior, 
 and Napoleon, have all benefited by this disposition 
 among ourselves to exaggerate the merit of diabolic 
 enmity. Not one of these men was ever capable, in a 
 solitary instance, of praising an enemy (what do you say 
 to that, reader ?) ; and yet in their behalf, we consent to 
 forget, not their crimes only, but (which is worse) their 
 hideous bigotry and anti-magnanimous egotism — for 
 nationality it was not. Suffren,° and some half dozen of 
 other French nautical heroes, because rightly they did 
 us all the mischief they could (which was really great), 
 are names justly reverenced in England. On the same 
 principle, La Pucelle d'Orl^ans, the victorious enemy of 
 England, has been destined to receive her deepest com- 
 memoration from the magnanimous justice of Englishmen. 
 5. Joanna, as we in England should call her, but ac- 
 cording to her own statement, Jeanne (or, as M. Michelet 
 
10 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 asserts, Jean ^) D'Arc was born at Domr^my, a village on 
 the marches of Lorraine and Champagne, and dependent 
 upon the town of Vaucouleurs. I have called her a Lor- 
 rainer, not simply because the word is prettier, but be- 
 cause Champagne too odiously reminds us English of 
 what are for us imaginary wines — which, undoubtedly, 
 La Pucelle tasted as rarely as we English : we English, 
 because the champagne of London is chiefly grown in 
 Devonshire ; La Pucelle, because the champagne of 
 Champagne never, by any chance, flowed into the foun- 
 tain of Domr^my, from which only she drank. M. 
 Michelet will have her to be a Champenoise° and for no 
 better reason than that she "took after her father," who 
 happened to be a Champenois. 
 
 6. These disputes, however, turn on refinements too 
 nice. Domr^my stood upon the frontiers, and, like 
 other frontiers, produced a mixed race, representing the 
 cis and the trans.'' A river (it is true) formed the 
 boundary line at this point — the river Meuse ; and thaty 
 
 1 "Jean" : — M. Michelet asserts that there was a mystical meaning 
 at that era in calling a child Jean; it implied a secret commendation of 
 a child, if not a dedication, to St. John the evangelist, the beloved dis- 
 ciple, the apostle of love and mysterious visions. But, really, as the 
 name was so exceedingly common, few people will detect a mystery in 
 calling a day by the name of Jack, though it does seem mysterious to 
 call a girl Jack. It may be less so in France, where a beautiful practice 
 has always prevailed of giving a boy his mother's name — preceded and 
 strengthened by a male name, as Charles Anne, Victor Victoire. In 
 cases where a mother's memory has been unusually dear to a son, this 
 vocal memento of her, locked into the circle of his own name, gives to it 
 the tenderness of a testamentary relic, or a funeral ring. I presume, 
 therefore, that La Pucelle must have borne the baptismal name of 
 Jeanne Jean ; the latter with no reference, perhaps, to so sublime a per- 
 son as St. John, but simply to some relative. 
 
JOAN OF ARC II 
 
 in old days, might have divided the populations ; but in 
 these days it did not; there were bridges, there were 
 ferries, and weddings crossed from the right bank to the 
 left. Here lay two great roads, not so much for travellers 
 that were few, as for armies that were too many by half. 
 These two roads, one of which was the great highroad 
 between France and Germany, decussated^ at this very 
 point ; which is a learned way of saying that they formed 
 a St. Andrew's Cross, or letter X. I hope the compositor 
 will choose a good large X ; in which case the point of 
 intersection, the locus of conflux and intersection for 
 these four diverging arms, will finish the reader's geo- 
 graphical education, by showing him to a hair's-breadth 
 where it was that Domr^my stood. These roads, so 
 grandly situated, as great trunk arteries between two 
 mighty realms,^ and haunted for ever by wars or rumours 
 of wars, decussated (for anything I know to the contrary) 
 absolutely under Joanna's bedroom window ; one rolling 
 away to the right, past M. D'Arc's old barn, and the other 
 unaccountably preferring to sweep round that odious 
 man's ° pig-sty to the left. 
 
 7. On whichever side of the border chance had thrown 
 Joanna, the same love to France would have been nurtured. 
 For it is a strange fact, noticed by M. Michelet and others, 
 that the Dukes of Bar and Lorraine had for generations 
 pursued the policy of eternal warfare with PVance on their 
 own account, yet also of eternal amity and league with 
 France in case anybody else presumed to attack her. 
 
 1 And reminding one of that description, so justly admired by Paul 
 Richter, which a Russian Czarina placed on a guide-post near Moscow. 
 This is the road that leads to Constantinople. 
 
12 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 Let peace settle upon France, and before long you might 
 rely upon seeing the little vixen Lorraine flying at the 
 throat of France. Let France be assailed by a formidable 
 enemy, and instantly you saw a Duke of Lorraine insist- 
 ing on having his own throat cut in support of France ; 
 which favour accordingly was cheerfully granted to him 
 in three great successive battles : twice by the English, 
 viz., at Cr^cy° and Agincourt,° once by the Sultan at 
 Nicopolis.° 
 
 8. This sympathy with France during great eclipses, in 
 those that during ordinary seasons were always teasing 
 her with brawls and guerilla inroads, strengthened the 
 natural piety to France of those that were confessedly the 
 children of her own house. The outposts of France, as 
 one may call the great frontier provinces, were of all 
 locahties the most devoted to the Fleurs de Lys. To 
 witness, at any great crisis, the generous devotion to these 
 lilies of the little fiery cousin that in gentler weather was 
 for ever tilting at the breast of France, could not but fan 
 the zeal of France's legitimate daughters ; while to occupy 
 a post of honour on the frontiers against an old hereditary 
 enemy of France would naturally stimulate this zeal by a 
 sentiment of martial pride, by a sense of danger always 
 threatening, and of hatred always smouldering. That 
 great four-headed road was a perpetual memento to 
 patriotic ardour. To say " This way lies the road to 
 Paris, and that other way to Aix-la-Chapelle ; this to 
 Prague, that to Vienna," nourished the warfare of the 
 heart by daily ministrations of sense. The eye that 
 watched for the gleams of lance or helmet from the hostile 
 frontier, the ear that listened for the groaning of wheels, 
 
JOAN OF ARC 13 
 
 made the highroad itself, with its relations to centres so 
 remote, into a manual of patriotic duty. 
 
 9. The situaftion, therefore, locally, of Joanna was full 
 of profound suggestions to a heart that listened for the 
 stealthy steps of change and fear that too surely were 
 in motion. But, if the place were grand, the time, the 
 burden of the time, was far more so. The air overhead 
 in its upper chambers was hm-tling with the obscure 
 sound ; was dark with sullen fermenting of storms that had 
 been gathering for a hundred and thirty years. The 
 battle of Agincourt in Joanna's childhood had reopened 
 the wounds of France. Cr^cy and Poictiers,° those 
 withering overthrows ° for the chivalry of France, had, 
 before Agincourt occurred, been tranquihsed by more than 
 half a century; but this resurrection of their trumpet 
 wails made the whole series of battles and endless skir- 
 mishes take their stations as parts in one drama. The 
 graves that had closed sixty years ago seemed to fly open 
 in sympathy with a sorrow that echoed their own. The 
 monarchy of France laboured in extremity, rocked and 
 reeled like a ship fighting with the darkness of monsoons. 
 The madness of the poor king° (Charles VL), falling in at 
 such a crisis, Hke the case of women labouring in child- 
 birth during the storming of a city, trebled the awfulness 
 of the time. Even the wild story of the incident which 
 had immediately occasioned the explosion of this madness 
 — the case of a man unknown, gloomy, and perhaps 
 maniacal himself, coming out of a forest at noonday, 
 laying his hand upon the bridle of the king's horse, check- 
 ing him for a moment to say, " Oh, king, thou art 
 betrayed," and then vanishing, no man knew whither, as 
 
14 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 he had appeared for no man knew what — fell in with the 
 universal prostration of mind that laid France on her 
 knees, as before the slow unweaving of some ancient 
 prophetic doom. The famines, the extraordinary diseases,° 
 the insurrections of the peasantry up and down Europe — 
 these were chords struck from the same mysterious harp ; 
 but these were transitory chords. There had been others 
 of deeper and more ominous sound. The termination of 
 the Crusades,° the destruction of the Templars,° the Papal 
 interdicts,^ the tragedies caused or suffered by the house 
 of Anjou,° and by the Emperor ° — these were full of a 
 more permanent significance. But, since then, the 
 colossal figure of feudalism was seen standing, as it were 
 on tiptoe, at Crecy, for flight from earth : that was a revo- 
 lution unparalleled ; yet //taf was a trifle by comparison 
 with the more fearful revolutions that were mining below 
 the Church. By her own internal schisms, by the abomi- 
 nable spectacle of a double Pope° — so that no man, 
 except through political bias, could even guess which was 
 Heaven's vicegerent, and which the creature of Hell — 
 the Church was rehearsing, as in still earlier forms she had 
 already rehearsed, those vast rents ° in her foundations 
 which no man should ever heal. 
 
 10. These were the loftiest peaks of the cloudland in 
 the skies that to the scientific gazer first caught the colours 
 of the new morning in advance. But the whole vast 
 range ahke of sweeping glooms overhead dwelt upon all 
 meditative minds, even upon those that could not dis- 
 tinguish the tendencies nor decipher the forms. It was 
 therefore, not her own age alone, as affected by its 
 immediate calamities, that lay with such weight upon 
 
JOAN OF ARC 15 
 
 Joanna's mind, but her own age as one section in a vast 
 mysterious drama, unweaving through a century back, and 
 drawing nearer continually to some dreadful crisis. Cat- 
 aracts and rapids were heard roaring ahead ; and signs 
 were seen far back, by help of old men's memories, which 
 answered secretly to signs now coming forward on the 
 eye, even as locks answer to keys. It was not wonderful 
 that in such a haunted soUtude, with such a haunted 
 heart, Joanna should see angelic visions, and hear angelic 
 voices. These voices whispered to her for ever the duty 
 self-imposed of delivering France. Five years she 
 hstened to these monitory voices with internal struggles. 
 At length she could resist no longer. Doubt gave way ; 
 and she left her home for ever in order to present herself 
 at the dauphin's court. 
 
 11. The education of this poor girl was mean according 
 to the present standard : was ineffably grand, according 
 to a purer philosophic standard : and only not good for 
 our age because for us it would be unattainable. She 
 read nothing, for she could not read ; but she had heard 
 others read parts of the Roman martyrology. She wept 
 in sympathy with the sad " Misereres " ° of the Romish 
 Church; she rose to heaven with the glad triumphant " Te 
 Deums"° of Rome ; she drew her comfort and her vital 
 strength from the rites of the same Church. But, next 
 after these spiritual advantages, she owed most to the 
 advantages of her situation. The fountain of Domr^my 
 was on the brink of a boundless forest ; and it was haunted 
 to that degree by fairies that the parish priest (^ure) was 
 obliged to read mass there once a year, in order to keep 
 them in any decent bounds. Fairies are important, jsven 
 
l6 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 in a statistical view : certain weeds mark poverty in the 
 soil, fairies mark its solitude. As surely as the wolf re- 
 tires before cities does the fairy sequester herself from 
 the haunts of the licensed victualer. A village is too 
 much for her nervous dehcacy ; at most, she can tolerate 
 a distant view of a hamlet. We may judge, therefore, 
 by the uneasiness and extra trouble which they gave to 
 the parson, in what strength the fairies mustered at Dom- 
 r^my, and, by a satisfactory consequence, how thinly sown 
 with men and women must have been that region even in 
 its inhabited spots. But the forests of Domr^my — those 
 were the glories of the land : for in them abode myste- 
 rious powers and ancient secrets that towered into tragic 
 strength. " Abbeys there were, and abbey windows " — 
 "like Moorish temples of the Hindoos " — that exercised 
 even princely power both in Lorraine and in the German 
 Diets. These had their sweet bells that pierced the for- 
 ests for many a league at matins or vespers, and each its 
 own dreamy legend. Few enough, and scattered enough, 
 were these abbeys, so as in no degree to disturb the deep 
 sohtude of the region ; yet many enough to spread a net- 
 work or awning of Christian sanctity over what else might 
 have seemed a heathen wilderness. This sort of rehgious 
 talisman being secured, a man the most afraid of ghosts 
 (like myself, suppose, or the reader) becomes armed into 
 courage to wander for days in their sylvan recesses. The 
 mountains of the Vosges, on the eastern frontier of France, 
 have never attracted much notice from Europe, except in 
 1 813-14 for a few brief months, when they fell within 
 Napoleon's line of defence against the Allies. But they 
 are interesting for this among other features, that they do 
 
JOAN OF ARC 17 
 
 not, like some loftier ranges, repel woods ; the forests and 
 the hills are on sociable terms. " Live and let live " is 
 their motto. For this reason, in part, these tracts in 
 Lorraine were a favourite hunting-ground with the Car- 
 lovingian princes. About six hundred years before 
 Joanna's childhood, Charlemagne was known to have 
 hunted there. That, of itself, was a grand incident in 
 the traditions of a forest or a chase. In these vast for- 
 ests, also, were to be found (if anywhere to be found) 
 those mysterious fawns ° that tempted solitary hunters 
 into visionary and perilous pursuits. Here was seen (if 
 anywhere seen) that ancient stag ° who was already nine 
 hundred years old, but possibly a hundred or two more, 
 when met by Charlemagne ; and the thing was put be- 
 yond doubt by the inscription upon his golden collar. I 
 beheve Charlemagne knighted the stag; and, if ever he 
 is met again by a king, he ought to be made an earl, or, 
 being upon the marches of France, a marquis. Observe, 
 I don't absolutely vouch for all these things : my own 
 opinion varies. On a fine breezy forenoon I am auda- 
 ciously sceptical ; but as twihght sets in my credulity grows 
 steadily, till it becomes equal to anything that could be 
 desired. And I have heard candid sportsmen declare 
 that, outside of these very forests, they laughed loudly at all 
 the dim tales connected with their haunted solitudes, but, 
 on reaching a spot notoriously eighteen miles deep within 
 them, they agreed with Sir Roger de Coverley that a 
 good deal might be said on both sides. 
 
 12. Such traditions, or any others that (like the stag) 
 connect distant generations with each other, are, for that 
 cause, subHme ; and the sense of the shadowy, connected 
 
1 8 • THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 with such appearances that reveal themselves or not ac- 
 cording to circumstances, leaves a colouring of sanctity 
 over ancient forests, even in those minds that utterly 
 reject the legend as a fact. 
 
 13. But, apart from all distinct stories of that order, in 
 any solitary frontier between two great empires — as 
 here, for instance, or in the desert between Syria and the 
 Euphrates — there is an inevitable tendency, in minds 
 of any deep sensibility, to people the solitudes with 
 phantom images of powers that were of old so vast. 
 Joanna, therefore, in her quiet occupation of a shepherd- 
 ess, would be led continually to brood over the political 
 condition of her country by the traditions of the past no 
 less than by the mementoes of the local present. 
 
 14. Michelet, indeed, says that La Pucelle was not a 
 shepherdess. I beg his pardon; she was. What he 
 rests upon I guess pretty well : it is the evidence of a 
 woman called Haumette, the most confidential friend of 
 Joanna. Now, she is a good witness, and a good girl, 
 and I like her ; for she makes a natural and affectionate 
 report of Joanna's ordinary life. But still, however good 
 she may be as a witness, Joanna is better ; and she, when 
 speaking to the dauphin, calls herself in the Latin re- 
 port Bergereta° Even Haumette confesses that Joanna 
 tended sheep in her girlhood. And I believe that, if Miss 
 Haumette were taking coffee along with me this very 
 evening (February 12, 1847) — ,in which there would be 
 no subject for scandal or for maiden blushes, because 1 
 am an intense philosopher, and Miss H. would be hard 
 upon 450 years old — she would admit the following 
 comment upon her evidence to be right. A Frenchman, 
 
JOAN OF ARC 19 
 
 about forty years ago — M. Simond, in his " Travels " — 
 mentions accidentally the following hideous scene as one 
 steadily observed and watched by himself in chivalrous 
 France not very long before the French Revolution : A 
 peasant was ploughing ; and the team that drew his plough 
 was a donkey and a woman. Both were regularly har- 
 nessed ; both pulled alike. This is bad enough ; but the 
 Frenchman adds that, in distributing his lashes, the peas- 
 ant was obviously desirous of being impartial ; or, if either 
 of the yokefellows had a right to complain, certainly it was 
 not the donkey. Now, in any country where such deg- 
 radation of females could be tolerated by the state of 
 manners, a woman of dehcacy would shrink from ac- 
 knowledging, either for herself or her friend, that she had 
 ever been addicted to any mode of labour not strictly 
 domestic ; because, if once owning herself a prsedial ser- 
 vant, she would be sensible that this confession extended 
 by probability in the hearer's thoughts to the having in- 
 curred indignities of this horrible kind. Haumette clearly 
 thinks it more dignified for Joanna to have been darning 
 the stockings of her horny-hoofed father, M. D'Arc, than 
 keeping sheep, lest she might then be suspected of having 
 ever done something worse. But, luckily, there was no 
 danger oithat: Joanna never was in service ; and my opin- 
 ion is that her father should have mended his own stock- 
 ings, since probably he was the party to make the holes in 
 them, as many a better man than D'Arc does — meaning 
 by that not myself, because, though probably a better man 
 than D'Arc, I protest against doing anything of the kind. 
 If I lived even with Friday in Juan Fernandez, either 
 Friday must do all the darning, or else it must go undone. 
 
20 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 The better men that I meant were the sailors in the British 
 navy, every man of whom mends his own stockings. 
 Who else is to do it ? Do you suppose, reader, that the 
 junior lords of the admiralty are under articles to darn 
 for the navy? 
 
 15. The reason, meantime, for my systematic hatred 
 of ^' Arc is this : There was a story current in France 
 before the Revolution, framed to ridicule the pauper 
 aristocracy, who happened to have long pedigrees and 
 short rent rolls : viz., that a head of such a house, dating 
 from the Crusades, was overheard saying to his son, a 
 ChevaHer of St. Louis, " Chevalier^ as-tu donne au cochofi 
 a manger ? " ° Now, it is clearly made out by the surviving 
 evidence that D'Arc would much have preferred continu- 
 ing to say, " Mafille, as-tu donne au cochon a manger?'^ 
 to saying, " Fucelle d' Orleans, as-tu sauve les fleurs-de- 
 lys?^' There is an old Enghsh copy of verses which 
 argues thus : 
 
 ** If the man that turnips cries 
 Cry not when his father dies, 
 Then 'tis plain the man had rather 
 Have a turnip than his father." 
 
 I cannot say that the logic of these verses was ever entirely 
 to my satisfaction. I do not see my way through it as 
 clearly as could be wished. But I see my way most clearly 
 through D'Arc ; and the result is — that he would greatly 
 have preferred not merely a turnip to his father, but the 
 saving a pound or so of bacon to saving the Oriflamme 
 of France. 
 
 16. It is probable (as M. Michelet suggests) that the 
 title of Virgin or Pucelle had in itself, and apart from the 
 
JOAN OF ARC 21 
 
 miraculous stories about her, a secret power over the rude 
 soldiery and partisan chiefs of that period ; for in such 
 a person they saw a representative manifestation of the 
 Virgin Mary, who, in a course of centuries, had grown 
 steadily upon the popular heart. 
 
 17. As to Joanna's supernatural detection of the 
 dauphin° (Charles VII.) among three hundred lords and 
 knights, I am surprised at the credulity which could ever 
 lend itself to that theatrical juggle. Who admires more 
 than myself the subhme enthusiasm, the rapturous faith in 
 herself, of this pure creature? But I am far from admir- 
 ing stage artifices which not La Pucelle, but the court, 
 must have arranged ; nor can surrender myself to the con- 
 jurer's legerdemain, such as may be seen every day for a 
 shilling. Southey's " Joan of Arc " was published in 1 796. 
 Twenty years after, talking with Southey, I was surprised 
 to find him still owning a secret bias in favour of Joan, 
 founded on her detection of the dauphin. The story, for the 
 benefit of the reader new to the case, was this : La Pucelle 
 was first made known to the dauphin, and presented to 
 his court, at Chinon ; and here came her first trial. By 
 way of testing her supernatural pretensions, she was to find 
 out the royal personage amongst the whole ark of clean 
 and unclean creatures. Faihng in this coup d'essai,"" she 
 would not simply disappoint many a beating heart in the 
 glittering crowd that on different motives yearned for her 
 success, but she would ruin herself, and, as the oracle 
 within had told her, would, by ruining herself, ruin France. 
 Our own Sovereign Lady Victoria rehearses annually a 
 trial not so severe in degree, but the same in kind. She 
 "pricks "° for sheriffs. Joanna pricked for a king. But 
 
22 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 observe the difference : our own Lady pricks for two men 
 out of three ; Joanna for one man out of three hundred. 
 Happy Lady of the Islands and the Orient ! — she can go 
 astray in her choice only by one-half: to the extent of one- 
 half she must have the satisfaction of being right. And 
 yet, even with these tight limits to the misery of a bound- 
 less discretion, permit me, Liege Lady, with all loyalty, 
 to submit that now and then you prick with your pin the 
 wrong man. But the poor child from Domremy, shrink- 
 ing under the gaze of a dazzling court — not because daz- 
 zling (for in visions she had seen those that were more 
 so), but because some of them wore a scoffing smile on 
 their features — how should she throw her hne into so 
 deep a river to angle for a king, where many a gay creature 
 was sporting that masqueraded as kings in dress ! Nay, 
 even more than any true king would have done : for, in 
 Southey's version of the story, the dauphin says, by way 
 of trying the virgin's magnetic sympathy with royalty, 
 
 " On the throne, 
 I the while mingling with the menial throng, 
 Some courtier shall be seated." 
 
 This usurper is even crowned ; " the jeweled crown 
 shines on a menial's head." But, really, that is " un peu 
 fort^^ ° ; and the mob of spectators might raise a scruple 
 whether our friend the jackdaw upon the throne, and the 
 dauphin himself, were not grazing the shins of treason. 
 For the dauphin could not lend more than belonged to 
 him. According to the popular notion, he had no crown 
 for himself; consequently none to lend, on any pretence 
 whatever, until the consecrated Maid should take him to 
 
JOAN OF ARC 23 
 
 Rheims. This was the popular notion in France. But 
 certainly it was the dauphin's interest to support the 
 popular notion, as he meant to use the services of Joanna. 
 For if he were king already, what was it that she could do 
 for him beyond Orleans ? That is to say, what more than 
 a merely military service could she render him? And, 
 above all, if he were king without a coronation, and with- 
 out the oil from the sacred ampulla, what advantage was 
 yet open to him by celerity above his competitor, the 
 English boy?° Now was to be a race for a coronation : 
 he that should win that race carried the superstition of 
 France along with him : he that should first be drawn 
 from the ovens of Rheims ° was under that superstition 
 baked into a king. 
 
 18. La Pucelle, before she could be allowed to practise 
 as a warrior, was put through her manual and platoon 
 exercise, as a pupil in divinity, at the bar of six eminent 
 men in wigs. According to Southey (v. 393, bk. iii., in 
 the original edition of his "Joan of Arc,") she "appalled 
 the doctors." It's not easy to do that: but they had 
 some reason to feel bothered, as that surgeon would 
 assuredly feel bothered who, upon proceeding to dissect 
 a subject, should find the subject retaliating as a dissector 
 upon himself, especially if Joanna ever made the speech 
 to them which occupies v. 354-391, bk. iii. It is a 
 double impossibility; ist, because a piracy from Tindal's 
 " Christianity as old as the Creation " — a piracy a parte 
 aiite° and by three centuries ; 2d, it is quite contrary to 
 the evidence on Joanna's trial. Southey's "Joan" of 
 A.D. 1796 (Cottle, Bristol) tells the doctors, among other 
 secrets, that she never in her fife attended — ist. Mass; 
 
24 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 nor 2d, the Sacramental Table ; nor 3d, Confession. In 
 the meantime, all this deistical confession of Joanna's, 
 besides being suicidal for the interest of her cause, is 
 opposed to the depositions upon both trials. ° The very 
 best witness called from first to last deposes that Joanna 
 attended these rites of her Church even too often ; was 
 taxed with doing so : and by blushing, owned the charge 
 as a fact, though certainly not as a fault. Joanna was a 
 girl of natural piety, that saw God in forests and hills and 
 fountains, but did not the less seek him in chapels and 
 consecrated oratories. 
 
 19. This peasant girl was self-educated through her 
 own natural meditativeness. If the reader turns to that 
 divine passage in " Paradise Regained " which Milton has 
 put into the mouth of our Saviour when first entering the 
 wilderness, and musing upon the tendency of those great 
 impulses growing within himself — 
 
 " Oh, what a multitude of thoughts at once 
 Awakened in me swarm, while I consider 
 "What from within I feel myself, and hear 
 What from without comes often to my ears, 
 111 sorting with my present state compared ! 
 When I was yet a child, no childish play 
 To me was pleasing ; all my mind was set 
 Serious to learn and know, and thence to do, 
 W^hat might be public good ; myself I thought 
 Born to that end — " 
 
 he will have some notion of the vast reveries which 
 brooded over the heart of Joanna in early girlhood, when 
 the wings were budding that should carry her from Orleans 
 to Rheims ; when the golden chariot was dimly revealing 
 
JOAN OF ARC 25 
 
 itself that should carry her from the kingdom oi France 
 Delivered \.o the Eternal Kingdom. 
 
 20. It is not requisite for the honour of Joanna, nor is 
 there in this place room, to pursue her brief career of 
 action. That, though wonderful, forms the earthly part of 
 her story ; the spiritual part is the saintly passion of her 
 imprisonment, trial, and execution. It is unfortunate, 
 therefore, for Southey's "Joan of Arc" (which, however, 
 should always be regarded as z. juvenile effort), that 
 precisely when her real glory begins the poem ends. But 
 this limitation of the interest grew, no doubt, from the 
 constraint inseparably attached to the law of epic unity. 
 Joanna's history bisects into two opposite hemispheres, 
 and both could not have been presented to the eye in one 
 poem, unless by sacrificing all unity of theme, or else by 
 involving the earlier half, as a narrative episode, in the 
 latter; which, however, might have been done, for it 
 might have been communicated to a fellow-prisoner, or a 
 confessor, by Joanna herself. It is sufficient, as concerns 
 this section of Joanna's life, to say that she fulfilled, to the 
 height of her promises, the restoration of the prostrate 
 throne. France had become a province of England, and 
 for the ruin of both, if such a yoke could be maintained. 
 Dreadful pecuniary exhaustion caused the EngUsh energy 
 to droop ; and that critical opening La Pucelle used with 
 a corresponding felicity of audacity and suddenness 
 (that were in themselves portentous) for introducing the 
 wedge of French native resources, for rekindling the 
 national pride, and for planting the dauphin once more 
 upon his feet. When Joanna appeared, he had been on 
 the point of giving up the struggle with the English, dis- 
 
26 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 tressed as they were, and of flying to the south of France. 
 She taught him to blush for such abject counsels. She 
 liberated Orleans, that great city, so decisive by its fate 
 for the issue of the war, and then beleaguered by the 
 English with an elaborate application of engineering skill 
 unprecedented in Europe. Entering the city after sunset 
 on the 29th of April, she sang mass on Sunday, May 8th, 
 for the entire disappearance of the besieging force. On 
 the 29th of June she fought and gained over the English 
 the decisive battle of Patay ; on the 9th of July she took 
 Troyes by a conp-de-main° from a mixed garrison of English 
 and Burgundians ; on the 15th of that month she carried 
 the dauphin into Rheims; on Sunday the 17 th she 
 crowned him ; and there she rested from her labour of 
 triumph. All that was to be done she had now accom- 
 plished ; what remained was — to suffer. 
 
 21. All this forward movement was her own ; excepting 
 one man, the whole council was against her. Her enemies 
 were all that drew power from earth. Her supporters 
 were her own strong enthusiasm, and the headlong con- 
 tagion by which she carried this subhme frenzy into the 
 hearts of women, of soldiers, and of all who lived by 
 labour. Henceforward she was thwarted ; and the worst 
 error that she committed was to lend the sanction of her 
 presence to counsels which she had ceased to approve. 
 But she had now accomplished the capital objects which 
 her own visions had dictated. These involved all the rest. 
 Errors were now less important ; and doubtless it had 
 now become more difficult for herself to pronounce 
 authentically what were errors. The noble girl had 
 achieved, as by a rapture of motion, the capital end of 
 
JOAN OF ARC 27 
 
 clearing out a free space around her sovereign, giving 
 him the power to move his arms with effect, and, secondly, 
 the inappreciable ° end of winning for that sovereign what 
 seemed to all France the heavenly ratification of his rights, 
 by crowning him with the ancient solemnities. She had 
 made it impossible for the English now to step before her. 
 They were caught in an irretrievable blunder, owing partly 
 to discord among the uncles of Henry VI., partly to a want 
 of funds, but partly to the very impossibility which they 
 beHeved to press with tenfold force upon any French 
 attempt to forestall theirs. They laughed at such a 
 thought ; and, while they laughed, she did it. Henceforth 
 the single redress for the Enghsh of this capital oversight, 
 but which never cou/d have redressed it effectually, was 
 to vitiate and taint the coronation of Charles VII. as the 
 work of a witch. That policy, and not malice (as M. 
 Michelet is so happy to believe), was the moving principle 
 in the subsequent prosecution of Joanna. Unless they 
 unhinged the force of the first coronation in the popular 
 mind by associating it with power given from hell, they 
 felt that the sceptre of the invader was broken. 
 
 22. But she, the child that, at nineteen, had wrought 
 wonders so great for France, was she not elated ? Did 
 she not lose, as men so often kam lost, all sobriety of 
 mind when standing upon the pinnacle of success so 
 giddy? Let her enemies declare. During the progress 
 of her movement, and in the centre of ferocious struggles, 
 she had manifested the temper of her feelings by the 
 pity which she had everywhere expressed for the suffer- 
 ing enemy. She forwarded to the English leaders a touch- 
 ing invitation to unite with the French, as brothers, in a 
 
28 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 common crusade against infidels — thus opening the road 
 for a soldierly retreat. She interposed to protect the 
 captive or the wounded ; she mourned over the excesses 
 of her countrymen ; she threw herself off her horse to 
 kneel by the dying English soldier, and to comfort him 
 with such ministrations, physical or spiritual, as his situ- 
 ation allowed. "Nolebat,"° says the evidence, "uti 
 ense suo, aut quemquam interficere." She sheltered the 
 English that invoked her aid in her own quarters. She 
 wept as she beheld, stretched on the field of battle, so 
 many brave enemies that had died without confession. 
 And, as regarded herself, her elation expressed itself thus : 
 on the day when she had finished her work, she wept ; for 
 she knew that, when her triumphal task was done, her 
 end must be approaching. Her aspirations pointed only 
 to a place which seemed to her more than usually full of 
 natural piety, as one in which it would give her pleasure 
 to die. And she uttered, between smiles and tears, as a 
 wish that inexpressibly fascinated her heart, and yet was 
 half fantastic, a broken prayer that God would return 
 her to the solitudes from which he had drawn her, and 
 suffer her to become a shepherdess once more. It was 
 a natural prayer, because nature has laid a necessity upon 
 every human heart to seek for rest and to shrink from 
 torment. Yet, again, it was a half-fantastic prayer, be- 
 cause, from childhood upward, visions that she had no 
 power to mistrust, and the voices which sounded in 
 her ear for ever, had long since persuaded her mind that 
 for her no such prayer could be granted. Too well she 
 felt that her mission must be worked out to the end, and 
 that the end was now at hand. All went wrong from this 
 
JOAN OF ARC 29 
 
 time. She herself had created the funds out of which the 
 French restoration should grow ; but she was not suffered 
 to witness their development or their prosperous applica- 
 tion. More than one military plan was entered upon 
 which she did not approve. But she still continued to 
 expose her person as before. Severe wounds had not 
 taught her caution. And at length, in a sortie from 
 Compiegne (whether through treacherous collusion on 
 the part of her own friends is doubtful to this day) 
 she was made prisoner by the Burgundians, and finally 
 surrendered to the English. 
 
 23. Now came her trial. This trial, moving of course 
 under English influence, was conducted in chief by the 
 Bishop of Beauvais.° He was a Frenchman, sold to Eng- 
 lish interests, and hoping, by favour of the English leaders, 
 to reach the highest preferment. " Bishop that art. Arch- 
 bishop that shalt be, Cardinal that may est be," were the 
 words that sounded continually in his ear ; and doubtless 
 a whisper of visions still higher, of a triple crown,° and 
 feet upon the necks of kings, sometimes stole into his 
 heart. M. Michelet is anxious to keep us in mind that 
 this bishop was but an agent of the English. True. But 
 it does not better the case for his countryman that, being 
 an accomplice in the crime, making himself the leader in 
 the persecution against the helpless girl, he was willing to 
 be all this in the spirit, and with the conscious vileness of 
 a cat's-paw. Never from the foundations of the earth was 
 there such a trial as this, if it were laid open in all its 
 beauty of defence and all its hellishness of attack. Oh, 
 child of France ! shepherdess, peasant girl ! trodden under 
 foot by all around thee, how I honour thy flashing intellect, 
 
30 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 quick as God's lightning, and true as God's lightning to its 
 mark, that ran before France and laggard Europe by many 
 a century, confounding the malice of the ensnarer, and 
 making dumb the oracles of falsehood ! Is it not scanda- 
 lous, is it not humiliating to civilisation, that, even at this 
 day, France exhibits the horrid spectacle of judges ex- 
 amining the prisoner against himself °j seducing him, by 
 fraud, into treacherous conclusions against his own head • 
 using the terrors of their power for extorting confessions 
 from the frailty of hope : nay (which is worse), using the 
 blandishments of condescension and snaky kindness for 
 thawing into compliances of gratitude those whom they 
 had failed to freeze into terror? Wicked judges ! barbarian 
 jurisprudence 1 — that, sitting in your own conceit on the 
 summits of social wisdom, have yet failed to learn the first 
 principles of criminal justice — sit ye humbly and with 
 docility at the feet of this girl from Domremy, that tore 
 your webs of cruelty into shreds and dust. " Would you 
 examine me as a witness against myself?" was the question 
 by which many times she defied their arts. Continually 
 she showed that their interrogations were irrelevant to any 
 business before the court, or that entered into the ridiculous 
 charges against her. General questions were proposed to 
 her on points of casuistical divinity ; two-edged questions, 
 which not one of themselves could have answered, with- 
 out, on the one side, landing himself in heresy (as then 
 interpreted), or, on the other, in some presumptuous ex- 
 pression of self-esteem. Next came a wretched Dominican, 
 that pressed her with an objection, which, if applied to 
 the Bible, would tax every one of its miracles with un- 
 soundness. The monk had the excuse of never having 
 
JOAN Of arc 31 
 
 read the Bible. M. Michelet has no such excuse ; and it 
 makes one blush for him, as a philosopher, to find him 
 describing such an argument as " weighty," whereas it is 
 but a varied expression of rude Mahometan metaphysics. 
 Her answer to this, if there were room to place the whole 
 in a clear light, was as shattering as it was rapid. An- 
 other thought to entrap her by asking what language the 
 angelic visitors of her solitude had talked — as though 
 heavenly counsels could want polyglot interpreters for 
 every word, or that God needed language at all in whis- 
 pering thoughts to a human heart. Then came a worse 
 devil, who asked her whether the Archangel Michael had 
 appeared naked. Not comprehending the vile insinuation, 
 Joanna, whose poverty suggested to her simplicity that it 
 might be the costliness of suitable robes which caused 
 the demur, asked them if they fancied God, who clothed 
 the flowers of the valleys, unable to find raiment for his 
 servants. The answer of Joanna moves a smile of tender- 
 ness, but the disappointment of her judges makes one 
 laugh exultingly. Others succeeded by troops, who up- 
 braided her with leaving her father ; as if that greater 
 Father, whom she beheved herself to have been serving, 
 did not retain the power of dispensing with his own rules, 
 or had not said that for a less cause than martyrdom man 
 and woman should leave both father and mother. 
 
 24. On Easter Sunday, when the trial had been long 
 proceeding, the poor girl fell so ill as to cause a belief that 
 she had been poisoned. It was not poison. Nobody had 
 any interest in hastening a death so certain. M. Michelet, 
 whose sympathies with all feelings are so quick that one 
 would gladly see them always as justly directed, reads the 
 
32 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 case most truly. Joanna had a twofold malady. She was 
 visited by a paroxysm of the complaint called homesickness. 
 The cruel nature of her imprisonment, and its length, 
 could not but point her sohtary thoughts, in darkness and 
 in chains (for chained she was), to Domremy. And the 
 season, which was the most heavenly period of the spring, 
 added stings to this yearning. That was one of her mala- 
 dies — nostalgia, as medicine calls it ; the other was weari- 
 ness and exhaustion from daily combats with malice. She 
 saw that everybody hated her and thirsted for her blood ; 
 nay, many kind-hearted creatures that would have pitied 
 her profoundly, as regarded all political charges, had their 
 natural feelings warped by the belief that she had deahngs 
 with fiendish powers. She knew she was to die ; that was 
 not the misery ! the misery was that this consummation 
 could not be reached without so much intermediate strife, 
 as if she were contending for some chance (where chance 
 was none) of happiness, or were dreaming for a moment 
 of escaping the inevitable. Why, then, did she contend ? 
 Knowing that she would reap nothing from answering her 
 persecutors, why did she not retire by silence from the 
 superfluous contest? It was because her quick and eager 
 loyalty to truth would not suffer her to see it darkened by 
 frauds which she could expose, but others, even of candid 
 listeners, perhaps could not ; it was through that imperish- 
 able grandeur of soul which taught her to submit meekly 
 and without a struggle to her punishment, but taught her 
 not to submit — no, not for a moment — to calumny as to 
 facts, or to misconstruction as to motives. Besides, there 
 were secretaries all around the court taking down her 
 words. That was meant for no good to her. But the end 
 
JOAN OF ARC 33 
 
 does not always correspond to the meaning. And Joanna 
 might say to herself, "These words that will be used 
 against me to-morrow and the next day, perhaps, in some 
 nobler generation, may rise again for my justification." 
 Yes, Joanna, they are rising even now in Paris, and for 
 more than justification ! 
 
 25. Woman, sister, there are some things which you do 
 not execute as well as your brother, man ; no, nor ever 
 will. Pardon me if I doubt whether you will ever produce 
 a great poet from your choirs, or a Mozart, or a Phidias, 
 or a Michael Angelo, or a great philosopher, or a great 
 scholar. By which last is meant — not one who depends 
 simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and 
 electrical power of combination ; bringing together from 
 the four winds, Hke the angel of the resurrection, what else 
 were dust from dead men's bones, into the unity of breath- 
 ing life. If you caii create yourselves into any of these 
 great creators, w)iy have you not ? 
 
 26. Yet, sister woman, though I cannot consent to find 
 a Mozart or a Michael Angelo in your sex, cheerfully, and 
 with the love that burns in depths of admiration, I acknow- 
 ledge that you can do one thing as well as the best of us 
 men — a greater thing than even Milton is known to have 
 done, or Michael Angelo; you can die grandly, and as 
 goddesses would die, were goddesses mortaL If any dis- 
 tant worlds (which may be the case) are so far ahead of 
 us Tellurians in optical resources as to see disdnctly 
 through their telescopes all that we do on earth, what is 
 the grandest sight to which we ever treat them ? St. Peter's 
 at Rome, do you fancy, on Easter Sunday, or Luxor,° or 
 perhaps the Himalayas ? Oh, no ! my friend ; suggest 
 
34 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 something better ; these are baubles to them; they see in 
 other worlds, in their own, far better toys of the same kind. 
 These, take my word for it, are nothing. Do you give it 
 up? The finest thing, then, we have to show them is a 
 scaffold on the morning of execution. I assure you there 
 is a strong muster in those far telescopic worlds, on any 
 such morning, of those who happen to find themselves 
 occupying the right hemisphere for a peep at us. How, 
 then, if it be announced in some such telescopic world by 
 those who make a livelihood of catching glimpses at our 
 newspapers, whose language they have long since deci- 
 phered, that the poor victim in the morning's sacrifice is 
 a woman? How, if it be published in that distant world 
 that the sufferer wears upon her head, in the eyes of many, 
 the garlands of martyrdom ? How, if it should be some 
 Marie Antoinette,° the widowed queen, coming forward on 
 the scaffold, and presenting to the morning air her head, 
 turned gray by sorrow — daughter of Caesars kneeling 
 down humbly to kiss the guillotine, as one that worships 
 death? How, if it were the noble Charlotte Corday,° 
 that in the bloom of youth, that with the loveHest of persons, 
 that with homage waiting upon her smiles wherever she 
 turned her face to scatter them — homage that followed 
 those smiles as surely as the carols of the birds, after 
 showers in spring, follow the reappearing sun and the rac- 
 ing of sunbeams over the hills — yet thought all these 
 things cheaper than the dust upon her sandals, in com- 
 parison of deliverance from hell for her dear suffering 
 France ! Ah ! these were spectacles indeed for those 
 sympathising people in distant worlds ; and some, perhaps, 
 would suffer a sort of martyrdom themselves, because 
 
JOAN OF ARC 35 
 
 they could not testify their wrath, could not bear witness 
 to the strength of love and to the fury of hatred that 
 burned within them at such scenes, could not gather 
 into golden urns some of that glorious dust which rested 
 in the catacombs of earth. 
 
 27. On the Wednesday after Trinity Sunday in 143 1, 
 being then about nineteen years of age, the Maid of Arc 
 underwent her martyrdom. She was conducted before 
 mid-day, guarded by eight hundred spearmen, to a platform 
 of prodigious height, constructed of wooden billets sup- 
 ported by occasional walls of lath and plaster, and traversed 
 by hollow spaces in every direction for the creation of air 
 currents. The pile " struck terror," says M. Michelet, " by 
 its height " ; and, as usual, the English purpose in this is 
 viewed as one of pure mahgnity. But there are two ways 
 of explaining all that. It is probable that the purpose 
 was merciful. On the circumstances of the execution I 
 shall not linger. Yet, to mark the almost fatal felicity of 
 M. Michelet in finding out whatever may injure the English 
 name, at a moment when every reader will be interested 
 in Joanna's personal appearance, it is really edifying to 
 notice the ingenuity by which he draws into light from a 
 dark corner a very unjust account of it, and neglects, 
 though lying upon the highroad, a very pleasing one. Both 
 are from English pens. Grafton,° a chronicler, but httle 
 read, being a stiff-necked John Bull, thought fit to say that 
 no wonder Joanna should be a virgin, since her " foule 
 face" was a satisfactory solution of that particular merit. 
 HoUnshead,° on the other hand, a chronicler somewhat 
 later, every way more important, and at one time uni- 
 versally read, has given a very pleasing testimony to the 
 
36 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 interesting character of Joanna's person and engaging 
 manners. Neither of these men lived till the following 
 century, so that personally this evidence is none at all. 
 Grafton sullenly and carelessly believed as he wished to 
 believe ; HoHnshead took pains to inquire, and reports 
 undoubtedly the general impression of France. But I 
 cite the case as illustrating M. Michelet's candour.^ 
 
 1 Amongst the many ebullitions of M. Michelet's fury against us poor 
 English are four which will be Hkely to amuse the reader; and they are 
 the more conspicuous in collision with the justice which he sometimes 
 does us, and the very indignant admiration which, under some aspects, 
 he grants to us. 
 
 1. Our English literature he admires with some gnashing of teeth. 
 He pronounces it " fine and sombre," but, I lament to add, " sceptical, 
 Judaic, Satanic — in a word, antichristian." That Lord Byron should 
 figure as a member of this diabolical corporation will not surprise men. 
 It will surprise them to hear that Milton is one of its Satanic leaders. 
 Many are the generous and eloquent Frenchmen, besides Chateau- 
 briand who have, in the course of the last thirty years, nobly suspended 
 their own burning nationality, in order to render a more rapturous 
 homage at the feet of Milton ; and some of them have raised Milton 
 almost to a level with angelic natures. Not one of them has thought 
 of looking for him below the earth. As to Shakspere, M. Michelet 
 detects in him a most extraordinary mare's nest. It is this : he does 
 "not recollect to have seen the name of God" in any part of his 
 works. On reading such words, it is natural to rub one's eyes, and sus- 
 pect that all one has ever seen in this world may have been a pure 
 ocular delusion. In particular, I begin myself to suspect that the 
 word " la gloire " never occurs in any Parisian journal. " The great 
 English nation," says M. Michelet, " has one immense profound vice" 
 — to wit, "pride." Why, really, that may be true; but we have a 
 neighbour not absolutely clear of an " immense profound vice," as like 
 ours in colour and shape as cherry to cherry. In short, M. Michelet 
 thinks us, by fits and starts, admirable — only that we are detestable; 
 and he would adore some of our authors, were it not that so intensely 
 he could have wished to kick them. 
 
 2. M. Michelet thinks to lodge an arrow in our sides by a very odd 
 remark upon Thomas k Kempis : which is, that a man of any conceiv- 
 
JOAN OF ARC 37 
 
 able European blood — a Finlander, suppose, or a Zantiote — might 
 have written Tom ; only not an Englishman. Whether an Englishman 
 could have forged Tom must remain a matter of doubt, unless the 
 thing had been tried long ago. That problem was intercepted for ever 
 by Tom's perverseness in choosing to manufacture himself. Yet, since 
 nobody is better aware than M. Michelet that this very point of Kempis 
 having manufactured Kempis is furiously and hopelessly litigated, three 
 or four nations claiming to have forged his work for him, the shocking 
 old doubt will raise its snaky head once more — whether this forger, 
 who rests in so much darkness, might not, after all, be of English 
 blood. Tom, it may be feared, is known to modern English literature 
 chiefly by an irreverent mention of his name in a line of Peter Pindar's 
 (Dr. Wolcot) fifty years back, where he is described as 
 
 " Kempis Tom, 
 Who clearly shows the way to Kingdom Come." 
 
 Few in these days can have read him, unless in the Methodist version of 
 John Wesley. Among those few, however, happens to be myself; 
 which arose from the accident of having, when a boy of eleven, received 
 a copy of the " De Imitatione Christi " as a bequest from a relation 
 who died very young ; from which cause, and from the external pretti- 
 ness of the book — being a Glasgow reprint by the celebrated Foulis, 
 and gaily bound — I was induced to look into it, and finally read it 
 many times over, partly out of some sympathy which, even in those 
 days, I had with its simplicity and devotional fervour, but much more 
 from the savage delight I found in laughing at Tom's Latinity, That, I 
 freely grant to M. Michelet, is inimitable. Yet, after all, it is not cer- 
 tain whether the original was Latin. But, however, that may have 
 been, if it is possible that M. Michelet* can be accurate in saying that 
 there are no less than sixty French versions (not editions, observe, but 
 
 * " IfM. Michelet can be accurate " : — However, on consideration, this state- 
 ment does not depend on Michelet. The bibliographer Barbier has absolutely 
 specified sixty in a separate dissertation, soixante traductions, among those 
 even that have not escaped the search. The Italian translations are said to be 
 thirty. As to mere editions, not counting the early MSS. for half a century 
 before printing was introduced, those in Latin amount to 2000, and those in 
 French 1000. Meantime, it is very clear to me that this astonishing popularity 
 so entirely unparalleled in literature, could not have existed except in Roman 
 Catholic times, nor subsequently have lingered in any Protestant land. It was 
 the denial of Scripture fountains to thirsty lands which made this slender rill of 
 Scripture truth so passionately welcome. 
 
38 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 separate versions) existing of the " De Imitatione," how prodigious 
 inust have been the adaptation of the book to the rehgious heart of the 
 fifteenth century! Excepting the Bible, but excepting that only in 
 Protestant lands, no book known to man has had the same distinction. 
 It is the most marvellous bibhographical fact on record. 
 
 3. Our English girls, it seems, are as faulty in one way as we English 
 males in another. None of us men could have written the Opera Omnia 
 of M. a Kempis ; neither could any of our girls have assumed male 
 attire like La Pucelle. But why ? Because, says Michelet, English 
 girls and German think so much of an indecorum. Well, that is a 
 good fault, generally speaking. But M. Michelet ought to have remem- 
 bered a fact in the martyrologies which justifies both parties — the 
 French heroine for doing, and the general choir of English giils for 
 not doing. A female saint, specially renowned in France, had, for a 
 reason as weighty as Joanna's — viz., expressly to shield her modesty 
 among men — worn a male military harness. That reason and that 
 example authorised La Pucelle ; but our English girls, as a body, have 
 seldom any such reason, and certainly no such saintly example, to 
 plead. This excuses them. Yet, still, if it is indispensable to the 
 national character that our young women should now and then tres- 
 pass over the frontier of decorum, it then becomes a patriotic duty in 
 me to assure M. Michelet that we have such ardent females among us, 
 and in a long series ; some detected in naval hospitals when too sick to . 
 remember their disguise; some on fields of battle; muhitudes nsver 
 detected at all; some only suspected; and others discharged without 
 noise by war offices and other absurd people. In our navy, both royal 
 and commercial, and generally from deep remembrances of slighted 
 love, women have sometimes served in disguise for many years, taking 
 contentedly their daily allowance of burgoo, biscuit, or cannon-balls — 
 anything, in short, digestible or indigestible, that it might please Provi- 
 dence to send. One thing, at least, is to their credit : never any of 
 these poor masks, with their deep silent remembrances, have been 
 detected through murmuring, or what is nautically understood by 
 " skulking." So, for once, M. Michelet has an erratum to enter upon 
 the fiy-leaf of his book in presentation copies. 
 
 4. But the last of these ebullitions is the most lively. We English, 
 at Orleans, and after Orleans (which is not quite so extraordinary, if all 
 were told), fled before the Maid of Arc. Yes, says M. Michelet, you 
 did: deny it, if you can. Deny it, itioji cher? I don't mean to deny 
 it. Running away, in many cases, is a thing so excellent that no phi- 
 
JOAN OF ARC 39 
 
 28. The circumstantial incidents of the execution, un- 
 less with more space than I can now command, I should 
 be unwilling to relate. I should fear to injure, by im- 
 perfect report, a martyrdom which to myself appears so 
 unspeakably grand. Yet, for a purpose, pointing not at 
 Joanna, but at M. Michelet — viz., to convince him that 
 an Englishman is capable of thinking more highly of La 
 Pucelle than even her admiring countrymen — I shall, 
 in parting, allude to one or two traits in Joanna's de- 
 meanour on the scaffold, and to one or two in that of the 
 bystanders, which authorise me in questioning an opinion 
 
 losopher would, at times, condescend to adopt any other step. All of 
 us nations in Europe, without one exception, have shown our phi- 
 losophy in that way at times. Even people " qui ne se rendent pas " 
 have deigned both to run and to shout. " Sauve quipeut!" at odd 
 times of sunset ; though, for my part, I have no pleasure in recalling 
 unpleasant remembrances to brave men ; and yet, really, being so philo- 
 sophic, they ought not to be unpleasant. But the amusing feature in 
 M. Michelet's reproach is the way in which he itnproves and varies 
 against us the charge of running, as if he were singing a catch. Listen 
 to him : They " showed their backs," did these English. (Hip, hip, 
 hurrah! three times three!) " Behind good walls they let themselves be 
 taken." (Hip, hip ! nine times nine !) They " ran as fast as their legs 
 could carry them." (Hurrah ! twenty-seven times twenty-seven !) They 
 ''ran before a girl" ; they did. (Hurrah! eighty-one times eighty- 
 one !) This reminds one of criminal indictments on the old model 
 in English courts, where (for fear the prisoner should escape) the crown 
 lawyer varied the charge perhaps through forty counts. The law laid 
 its guns so as to rake the accused at every possible angle. While the 
 indictment was reading, he seemed a monster of crime in his own 
 eyes ; and yet, after all, the poor fellow had but committed one offence, 
 and not always that. N. B, — Not having the French original at 
 hand, I make my quotations from a friend's copy of Mr. Walter Kelly's 
 translation ; which seems to me faithful, spirited, and idiomatically 
 English — liable, in fact, only to the single reproach of occasional 
 provincialisms. 
 
40 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 of his upon this martyr's firmness. The reader ought to 
 be reminded that Joanna D'Arc was subjected to an un- 
 usually unfair trial of opinion. Any of the elder Chris- 
 tian martyrs had not much to fear of personal rancour. 
 The martyr was chiefly regarded as the enemy of Caesar ; 
 at times, also, where any knowledge of the Christian faith 
 and morals existed, with the enmity that arises sponta- 
 neously in the worldly against the spiritual. But the 
 martyr, though disloyal, was not supposed to be there- 
 fore anti-national ; and still less was individually hateful. 
 What was hated (if anything) belonged to his class, not 
 to himself separately. Now, Joanna, if hated at all, was 
 hated personally, and in Rouen on national grounds. 
 Hence there would be a certainty of calumny arising 
 against her such as would not affect martyrs in general. 
 That being the case, it would follow of necessity that 
 some people would impute to her a willingness to recant. 
 No innocence could escape that. Now, had she really 
 testified this willingness on the scaffold, it would have 
 argued nothing at all but the weakness of a genial nature 
 shrinking from the instant approach of torment. And 
 those will often pity that weakness most who, in their 
 own persons, would yield to it least. Meantime, there 
 never was a calumny uttered that drew less support from 
 the recorded circumstances. It rests upon no positive 
 testimony, and it has a weight of contradicting testimony 
 to stem. And yet, strange to say, M. Michelet, who at 
 times seems to admire the Maid of Arc as much as I do, 
 is the one sole writer among her friends who lends some 
 countenance to this odious slander. His words are that, 
 if she did not utter this word recant with her lips, she 
 
JOAN OF ARC 41 
 
 uttered it in her heart. " Whether she said the word is 
 uncertain ; but I affirm that she thought it." 
 
 29. Now, I affirm that she did not ; not in any sense 
 of the word ^^ thought'' appHcable to the case. Here is 
 France calumniating La Pucelle ; here is England de- 
 fending her. M. Michelet can only mean that, on a 
 priori° principles, every woman must be presumed liable 
 to such a weakness ; that Joanna was a woman ; ergo, 
 that she was Hable to such a weakness. That is, he only 
 supposes her to have uttered the word by an argument 
 which presumes it impossible for anybody to have done 
 otherwise. I, on the contrary, throw the onus of the 
 argument not on presumable tendencies of nature, but on 
 the known facts of that morning's execution, as recorded 
 by multitudes. What else, I demand, than mere 
 weight of metal, absolute nobility of deportment, broke 
 the vast Hne of battle then arrayed against her ? What 
 else but her meek, saintly demeanour won, from the ene- 
 mies that till now had beHeved her a witch, tears of rap- 
 turous admiration? 'jrYen thousand men," says M. 
 Michelet himself — "tela thousand men wept"; and of 
 these ten thousand the majority were political enemies 
 knitted together by cords of superstition. What else was 
 it but her constancy, united with her angelic gentleness, 
 that drove the fanatic English soldier — who had sworn 
 to throw a fagot on her scaffold as his tribute of abhor- 
 rence, that did so, that fulfilled his vow — suddenly to 
 turn away a penitent for hfe, saying everywhere that he 
 had seen a dove rising upon wings to heaven from the 
 ashes where she had stood? What else drove the exe 
 cutioner to kneel at every shrine for pardon to his shar 
 
 ■:) 
 
42 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 in the tragedy? And, if all this were insufficient, then I 
 cite the closing act of her life as valid on her behalf, were 
 all other testimonies against her. The executioner had 
 been directed to apply his torch from below. He did 
 so. The fiery smoke rose upward in billowing volumes. 
 A Dominican monk was then standing almost at her side. 
 Wrapped up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger, 
 but still persisted in his prayers. Even then, when the 
 last enemy was racing up the fiery stairs to seize her, 
 even at that moment did this noblest of girls think only 
 for hhn, the one friend that would not forsake her, and 
 not for herself; bidding him with her last breath to care 
 for his own preservation, but to leave her to God. That 
 girl, whose latest breath ascended in this sublime expres- 
 sion of self-oblivion, did not utter the word recant either 
 with her lips or in her heart. No ; she did not, though 
 one should rise from the dead to swear it. 
 
 ****** 
 30. Bishop of Beauvais ! thy victim died in fire upon 
 a scaffold — thou upon a down bed. But, for the de- 
 parting minutes of life, both are oftentimes ahke. At 
 the farewell crisis, when the gates of death are opening, 
 and flesh is resting from its struggles, oftentimes the 
 tortured and the torturer have the same truce from 
 carnal torment ; both sink together into sleep ; together 
 both sometimes kindle into dreams. When the mortal 
 mists were gathering fast upon you two, bishop and 
 shepherd girl — when the pavilions of life were closing 
 up their shadowy curtains about you — let us try, through 
 the gigantic glooms, to decipher the flying features of 
 your separate visions. 
 
JOAN OF ARC 43 
 
 31. The shepherd girl that had delivered 'France — 
 she, from her dungeon, she, from her baiting at the 
 stake, she, from her duel with fire, as she entered her 
 last dream — saw Domremy, saw the fountain of Dom- 
 r^my, saw the pomp of forests in which her childhood 
 had wandered. That Easter festival which man had 
 denied to her languishing heart — that resurrection of 
 springtime, which the darkness of dungeons had inter- 
 cepted from her, hungering after the glorious liberty of 
 forests — were by God given back into her hands as 
 jewels that had been stolen from her by robbers. With 
 those, perhaps (for the minutes of dreams can stretch 
 into ages), was given back to her by God the bliss of 
 childhood. By special privilege for her might be 
 created, in this farewell dream, a second childhood, 
 innocent as the first ; but not, like that, sad with the 
 gloom of a fearful mission in the rear. This mission had 
 now been fulfilled. The storm was weathered ; the 
 skirts even of that mighty storm were drawing off. The 
 blood that she was to reckon for had been exacted ; the 
 tears that she was to shed in secret had been paid to 
 the last. The hatred to herself in all eyes had been 
 faced steadily, had been suffered, had been survived. 
 And in her last fight upon the scaffold she had tri- 
 umphed gloriously ; victoriously she had tasted the stings 
 of death. For all, except this comfort from her fare- 
 well dream, she had died — died amid the tears of ten 
 thousand enemies — died amid the drums and trump- 
 ets of armies — died amid peals redoubhng upon peals, 
 volleys upon volleys, from the saluting clarions of 
 martyrs. 
 
44 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 32. Bishop of Beauvais ! because the guilt-burdened 
 man is in dreams haunted and waylaid by the most 
 frightful of his crimes, and because upon that fluctuating 
 mirror — rising (like the mocking mirrors of nib-age in 
 Arabian deserts) from the fens of death — most of all 
 are reflected the sweet countenances which the man has 
 laid in ruins; therefore I know, bishop, that you also, 
 entering your final dream, saw Domr^my. That fountain, 
 of which the witnesses spoke so much, showed itself to 
 your eyes in pure morning dews ; but neither dews, nor 
 the holy dawn, could cleanse away the bright spots of 
 innocent blood upon its surface. By the fountain, bishop, 
 you saw a woman seated, that hid her face. But, as you 
 draw near, the woman raises her wasted features. Would 
 Domr^my know them again for the features of her child ? 
 Ah, but you know them, bishop, well ! Oh, mercy ! 
 what a groan was that which the servants, waiting outside 
 the bishop's dream at his bedside, heard from his labour- 
 ing heart, as at this moment he turned away from the 
 fountain and the woman, seeking rest in the forests afar 
 off. Yet not so to escape the woman, whom once again 
 he must behold before he dies. In the forests to which 
 he prays for pity, will he find a respite ? What a tumult, 
 what a gathering of feet is there ! In glades where only 
 wild deer should run armies and nations are assembling ; 
 towering in the fluctuating crowd are phantoms that 
 belong to departed hours. There is the great English 
 Prince, Regent of France. There is my Lord of Win- 
 chester, the princely cardinal, that died and made no 
 sign. There is the bishop of Beauvais, chnging to the 
 shelter of thickets. What building is that which hands 
 
JOAN OF ARC 45 
 
 so rapid are raising? Is it a martyr's scaffold? Will 
 they burn the child of Domr^my a second time? No ; it 
 is a tribunal that rises to the clouds; and two nations 
 stand around it, waiting for a trial. Shall my Lord of 
 Beauvais sit again upon the judgment-seat, and again 
 number the hours for the innocent ? Ah, no ! he is the 
 prisoner at the bar. Already all is waiting : the mighty 
 audience is gathered, the Court is hurrying to their seats, 
 the witnesses are arrayed, the trumpets are sounding, the 
 judge is* taking his place. Oh, but this is sudden ! My 
 lord, have you no counsel ? " Counsel I have none ; in 
 heaven above, or on earth beneath, counsellor there is 
 none r\ow that would take a brief from me: all are 
 silent." Is it, indeed, come to this? Alas ! the time is 
 short, the tumult is wondrous, the crowd stretches away 
 into infinity ; but yet I will search in it for somebody to 
 take your brief; I know of somebody that will be your 
 counsel. Who is this that cometh from Domr^my? 
 Who is she in bloody coronation robes from Rheims? 
 Who is she that cometh with blackened flesh from walk- 
 ing the furnaces of Rouen? This is she, the shepherd 
 girl, counsellor that had none for herself, whom I choose, 
 bishop, for yours. She it is, I engage, that shall take my 
 lord's brief. She it is, bishop, that would plead for you; 
 yes, bishop, she — when heaven and earth are silent. 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 
 
 Section the First — The Glory of Motion 
 
 1. Some twenty or more years before I matriculated 
 at Oxford, Mr. Palmer,° at that time M.P. for Bath, had 
 accomplished two things, very hard to do on our little 
 planet, the Earth, however cheap they may be held by 
 eccentric people in comets — he had invented mail- 
 coaches, and he had married the daughter of a duke.° 
 He was, therefore, just twice as great a man as Galileo, 
 who did certainly invent (or, which is the same thing,^ 
 discover) the satelHtes of Jupiter, those very next things 
 extant to mail-coaches in the two capital pretensions of 
 speed and keeping time, but, on the other hand, who did 
 not marry the daughter of a duke. 
 
 2. These mail-coaches, as organised by Mr. Palmer, 
 are entitled to a circumstantial notice from myself, having 
 had so large a share in developing the anarchies of my 
 subsequent dreams : an agency which they accomplished, 
 ist, through velocity at that time unprecedented — for they 
 first revealed the glory of motion ; 2dly, through grand 
 effects for the eye between lamplight and the darkness 
 upon solitary roads ; 3dly, through animal beauty and 
 
 1 " The same thing" : — Thus, in the calendar of the Church Festivals, 
 the discovery of the true cross (by Helen, the mother of Constantine) 
 is recorded (and, one might think,, with the express consciousness of 
 sarcasm) as the Invention of the Cross. 
 
 49 
 
50 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 power so often displayed in the class of horses selected 
 for this mail service ; 4thly, through the conscious pres- 
 ence of a central intellect, that, in the midst of vast° 
 distances^ — of storms, of darkness, of danger — over- 
 ruled all obstacles into one steady cooperation to a 
 national result. For my own feeling, this post-office 
 service spoke as by some mighty orchestra, where a 
 thousand instruments, all disregarding each other, and so 
 far in danger of discord, yet all obedient as slaves to the 
 supreme baton of some great leader, terminate in a per- 
 fection of harmony like that of heart, brain, and lungs in 
 a healthy animal organisation. But, finally, that particular 
 element in this whole combination which most impressed 
 myself, and through which it is that to this hour Mr. 
 Palmer's mail-coach system tyrannises over my dreams 
 by terror and terrific beauty, lay in the awful political 
 mission which at that time it fulfilled. The mail-coach 
 it was that distributed over the face of the land, like the 
 opening of apocalyptic vials,° the heart-shaking news 
 of Trafalgar,® of Salamanca,° of Vittoria,° of Waterloo. 
 These were the harvests that, in the grandeur of their 
 reaping, redeemed the tears and blood in which they 
 had been sown. Neither was the meanest peasant so 
 much below the grandeur and the sorrow of the times 
 as to confound battles such as these, which were gradu- 
 ally moulding the destinies of Christendom, with the 
 vulgar conflicts of ordinary warfare, so often no more 
 
 "^'^ Vast distances": — One case was familiar to mail-coach travellers 
 where two mails in opposite directions, north and south, starting at 
 the same minute from points six hundred miles apart, met almost con- 
 stantly at a particular bridge which bisected the total distance. 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 51 
 
 than gladiatorial trials of national prowess. The victo- 
 ries of England in this stupendous contest rose of 
 themselves as natural Te Dettms to heaven ; and it was 
 felt by the thoughtful that such victories, at such a crisis 
 of general prostration, were not more beneficial to our- 
 selves than finally to France, our enemy, and to the 
 nations of all western or central Europe, through whose 
 pusillanimity it was that the French domination had 
 prospered. 
 
 3. The mail-coach, as the national organ for publish- 
 ing these mighty events, thus diffusively influential, 
 became itself a spirituahsed and glorified object to an 
 impassioned heart ; and naturally, in the Oxford of that 
 day, all hearts were impassioned, as being all (or nearly 
 all) in early manhood. In most universities ° there is 
 one single college ; in Oxford there were five-and-twenty, 
 all of which were peopled by young men, the elite of their 
 own generation ; not boys, but men : none under 
 eighteen. In some of these many colleges the custom 
 permitted the student to keep what are called " short 
 terms " ; that is, the four terms of Michaelmas, Lent, 
 Easter, and Act,° were kept by a residence, in the ag- 
 gregate, of ninety-one days, or thirteen weeks. Under 
 this interrupted residence, it was possible that a student 
 might have a reason for going down ° to his home four 
 times in the year. This made eight journeys to and fro. 
 But, as these homes lay dispersed through all the shires 
 of the island, and most of us disdained all coaches except 
 his Majesty's mail, no city out of London could pretend 
 to so extensive a connexion with Mr. Palmer's estabhsh- 
 ment as Oxford. Three mails, at the least, I remember 
 
52 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 as passing every day through Oxford, and benefiting by 
 my personal patronage — viz., the Worcester, the Glouces- 
 ter, and the Holyhead mail. Naturally, therefore, it 
 became a point of some interest with us, whose journeys 
 revolved every six weeks on an average, to look a little 
 into the executive details of the system. With some of 
 these Mr. Palmer had no concern ; they rested upon bye- 
 laws enacted by posting-houses for their own benefit, and 
 upon other bye- laws, equally stern, enacted by the inside 
 passengers for the illustration of their own haughty ex- 
 clusiveness. These last were of a nature to rouse our 
 scorn, from which the transition was not very long to 
 systematic mutiny. Up to this time, say 1804, or 1805 
 (the year of Trafalgar), it had been the fixed assumption 
 of the four inside people (as an old tradition of all public 
 carriages derived from the reign of Charles II.) that they, 
 the illustrious quaternion, constituted a porcelain variety 
 of the human race, whose dignity would have been com- 
 promised by exchanging one word of civility with the 
 three miserable delf-ware outsides. Even to have kicked 
 an outsider might have been held to attaint ° the foot con- 
 cerned in that operation, so that, perhaps, it would have 
 required an act of Parliament to restore its purity of 
 blood. What words, then, could express the horror, and 
 the sense of treason, in that case, which ka^ happened, 
 where all three outsides (the trinity of Pariahs °) made a 
 vain attempt to sit down at the same breakfast-table or 
 dinner-table with the consecrated four? I myself wit- 
 nessed such an attempt ; and on that occasion a benevo- 
 lent old gentleman endeavoured to soothe his three holy 
 associates, by suggesting that, if the outsides were in- 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 53 
 
 dieted for this criminal attempt at the next assizes, the 
 court would regard it as a case of lunacy or delirium tre- 
 7nens rather than of treason. England owes much of her 
 grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in her 
 social composition, when pulHng against her strong de- 
 mocracy. I am not the man to laugh at it. But some- 
 times, undoubtedly, it expressed itself in comic shapes. 
 The course taken with the infatuated outsiders, in the 
 particular attempt which I have noticed, was that the 
 waiter, beckoning them away from the privileged salle- 
 d-manger° sang out, "This way, my good men," and 
 then enticed these good men away to the kitchen. But 
 that plan had not always answered. Sometimes, though 
 rarely, cases occurred where the intruders, being stronger 
 than usual, or more vicious than usual, resolutely refused 
 to budge, and so far carried their point as to have a 
 separate table arranged for themselves in a corner of the 
 general room. Yet, if an Indian screen could be found 
 ample enough to plant them out from the very eyes of 
 the high table, or dais^ it then became possible to as- 
 sume as a fiction of law that the three delf fellows, after 
 all, were not present. They could be ignored by the 
 porcelain men, under the maxim that objects not appear- 
 ing and objects not existing are governed by the same 
 logical construction.^ 
 
 4. Such being, at that time, the usage of mail-coaches, 
 what was to be done by us of young Oxford? We, the 
 most aristocratic of people, who were addicted to the prac- 
 tice of looking down superciliously even upon the insides 
 themselves as often very questionable characters — were 
 
 1 De non apparentibus, etc. 
 
54 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 we, by voluntarily going outside, to court indignities? If 
 our dress and bearing sheltered us generally from the sus- 
 picion of being "raff" (the name at that period for 
 " snobs " ^), we really wej-e such constructively by the place 
 we assumed. If we did not submit to the deep shadow of 
 eclipse, we entered at least the skirts of its penumbra.° 
 And the analogy of theatres was valid against us, — where 
 no man can complain of the annoyances incident to the pit 
 or gallery, having his instant remedy in paying the higher 
 price of the boxes. But the soundness of this analogy we 
 disputed. In the case of the theatre, it cannot be pretended 
 that the inferior situations have any separate attractions, 
 unless the pit may be supposed to have an advantage for the 
 purposes of the critic or the dramatic reporter. But the 
 critic or reporter is a rarity. For most people, the sole 
 benefit is in the price. Now, on the contrary, the out- 
 side of the mail had its own incommunicable advantages. 
 These we could not forego. The higher price we would 
 willingly have paid, but not the price connected with the 
 condition of riding inside ; which condition we pro- 
 nounced insufferable. The air, the freedom of prospect, 
 the proximity to the horses, the elevation of seat : these 
 were what we required ; but, above all, the certain antici- 
 pation of purchasing occasional opportunities of driving. 
 5. Such was the difficulty which pressed us; and un- 
 der the coercion of this difficulty we instituted a search- 
 ing inquiry into the true quality and valuation of the 
 
 1 "Snobs" and its antithesis, " nobs" arose among the internal factions 
 of shoemakers perhaps ten years later. Possibly enough, the terms 
 may have existed much earlier; but they were then first made known, 
 picturesquely and effectively, by a trial at some assizes which happened 
 to fix the public attention. 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 55 
 
 different apartments about the mail. We conducted this 
 inquiry on metaphysical principles; and it was ascer- 
 tained satisfactorily that the roof of the coach, which by 
 some weak men had been called the attics, and by some 
 the garrets, was in reahty the drawing-room ; in which 
 drawing-room the box was the chief ottoman or sofa ; 
 whilst it appeared that the inside, which had been tradi- 
 tionally regarded as the only room tenantable by gentle- 
 men, was, in fact, the coal-cellar in disguise. 
 
 6. Great wits jump.° The very same idea had not 
 long before struck the celestial intellect of China. 
 Amongst the presents carried out by our first embassy to 
 that country was a state-coach. It had been specially 
 selected as a personal gift by George III. ; but the exact 
 mode of using it was an intense mystery to Pekin. The 
 ambassador, indeed (Lord Macartney), had made some 
 imperfect explanations upon this point ; but, as His Ex- 
 cellency communicated these in a diplomatic whisper at 
 the very moment of his departure, the celestial intellect 
 was very feebly illuminated, and it became necessary to call 
 a cabinet council on the grand state question, "Where was 
 the Emperor to sit?" The hammer-cloth° happened to 
 be unusually gorgeous ; and, partly on that consideration, 
 but partly also because the box offered the most elevated 
 seat, was nearest to the moon, and undeniably went fore- 
 most, it was resolved by acclamation that the box was 
 the imperial throne, and, for the scoundrel who drove, — 
 he might sit where he could find a perch. The horses, 
 therefore, being harnessed, solemnly his imperial majesty 
 ascended his new EngHsh throne under a flourish of 
 trumpets, having the first lord of the treasury on his right 
 
56 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 hand, and the chief jester on his left. Pekin gloried in 
 the spectacle; and in the whole flowery people, con- 
 structively present by representation, there was but one 
 discontented person, and that was the coachman. This 
 mutinous individual audaciously shouted, " Where am / 
 to sit?" But the privy council, incensed by his disloy- 
 alty, unanimously opened the door, and kicked him into 
 the inside. He had all the inside places to himself; but 
 such is the rapacity of ambition that he was still dissatis- 
 fied. " I say," he cried out in an extempore petition 
 addressed to the Emperor through the window — "I say, 
 how am I to catch hold of the reins?" — "Anyhow," 
 was the imperial answer ; " don't trouble me, man, in my 
 glory. How catch the reins ? Why, through the windows, 
 through the keyholes — ^^zyhow." Finally this contu- 
 macious coachman lengthened the check-strings into a 
 sort of jury-reins communicating with the horses ; with 
 these he drove as steadily as Pekin had any right to ex- 
 pect. The Emperor returned after the briefest of cir- 
 cuits ; he descended in great pomp from his throne, with 
 the severest resolution never to remount it. A pubhc 
 thanksgiving was ordered for his majesty's happy escape 
 from the disease of a broken neck ; and the state-coach 
 was dedicated thenceforward as a votive offering to the 
 god Fo Fo — whom the learned more accurately called 
 Fi Fi. ° 
 
 7. A revolution of this same Chinese character did 
 young Oxford of that era effect in the constitution of 
 mail-coach society. It was a perfect French Revolution ; 
 and we had good reason to say, <;a ira. In fact, it soon 
 became too popular. The "public" — a well-known 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 57 
 
 character, particularly disagreeable, though slightly re- 
 spectable, and notorious for affecting the chief seats in 
 synagogues — had at first loudly opposed this revolution ; 
 but, when the opposition showed itself to be ineffectual, 
 our disagreeable friend went into it with headlong zeal. 
 At first it was a sort of race between us ; and, as the pub- 
 lic is usually from thirty to fifty years old, naturally we 
 of young Oxford, that averaged about twenty, had the 
 advantage. Then the pubHc took to bribing, giving fees 
 to horse-keepers, &c., who hired out their persons as 
 warming-pans on the box seat. That, you know, was 
 shocking to all moral sensibilities. Come to bribery, 
 said we, and there is an end to all morality, — Aristotle's, 
 Zeno's, Cicero's,° or anybody's. And, besides, of what 
 use was it? For we bribed also. And as our bribes to 
 those of the pubhc, were as five shillings to sixpence, 
 here again young Oxford had the advantage. But the 
 contest was ruinous to the principles of the stables con- 
 nected with the mails. This whole corporation was 
 constantly bribed, rebribed, and often surrebribed; a 
 mail-coach yard was like the hustings in a contested 
 election ; and a horse-keeper, ostler, or helper, was held 
 by the philosophical at that time to be the most corrupt 
 character in the nation. 
 
 8. There was an impression upon the public mind, 
 natural enough from the continually augmenting velocity 
 of the mail, but quite erroneous, that an outside seat on 
 this class of carriages was a post of danger. On the con- 
 trary, I maintained that, if a man had become nervous 
 from some gipsy prediction in his childhood, allocating 
 to a particular moon now approaching some unknown 
 
58 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 danger, and he should inquire earnestly, " Whither can I 
 fly for shelter ? Is a prison the safest retreat ? or a luna- 
 tic hospital? or the British Museum?" I should have 
 repHed, " Oh no ; I'll tell you what to do. Take lodg- 
 ings for the next forty days on the box of his Majesty's 
 mail. Nobody can touch you there. If it is by bills at 
 ninety days after date that you are made unhappy — if 
 noters and protesters ° are the sort of wretches whose 
 astrological shadows ° darken the house of life ° — then 
 note'you what I vehemently protest : viz., that, no mat- 
 ter though the sheriff and under-sheriff in every county 
 should be running after you with his posse, touch a hair 
 of your head he cannot whilst you keep house and have 
 your legal domicile on the box of the mail. It is felony 
 to stop the mail ; even the sheriff cannot do that. And 
 an ex^ra touch of the whip to the leaders (no great matter 
 if it grazes the sheriff) at any time guarantees your safety." 
 In fact, a bedroom in a quiet house seems a safe enough 
 retreat ; yet it is liable to its own notorious nuisances — 
 to robbers by night, to rats, to fire. But the mail laughs 
 at these errors. To robbers, the answer is packed up 
 and ready for delivery in the barrel of the guard's blun- 
 derbuss. Rats again ! there are none about mail-coaches 
 any more than snakes in Von Troll's ° Iceland^; except, 
 indeed, now and then a parliamentary rat, who always 
 hides his shame in what I have shown to be the" coal-cellar." 
 And, as to fire, I never knew but one in a mail-coach ; 
 
 ^"Von TroiVs Iceland": — The allusion is to a well-known chapter 
 in Von Troil's work, entitled, " Concerning the Snakes of Iceland." 
 The entire chapter consists of these six words — ''There are no snakes in 
 Iceland." 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 59 
 
 which was in the Exeter mail, and caused by an obstinate 
 sailor bound to Devonport. Jack, making light of the 
 law and the lawgiver that had set their faces against his 
 offence, insisted on taking up a forbidden seat ^ in the 
 rear of the roof, from which he could exchange his own 
 yarns with those of the guard. No greater offence was 
 then known to mail-coaches ; it was treason, it was l(zsa 
 majestas° it was by tendency arson ; and the ashes of 
 Jack's pipe, falling amongst the straw of the hinder boot, 
 containing the mail-bags, raised a flame which (aided by 
 the wind of our motion) threatened a revolution in the 
 republic of letters. Yet even this left the sanctity of the 
 box unviolated. In dignified repose, the coachman and 
 myself sat on, resting with benign composure upon our 
 knowledge that the fire would have to burn its way through 
 
 1 " Forbidden seat" : — The very sternest code of rules was enforced 
 upon the mails by the Post-office, Throughout England, only three 
 ciitsides were allowed, of whom one was to sit on the box, and the 
 other two immediately behind the box ; none, under any pretext, to 
 come near the guard ; an indispensable caution ; since else, under the 
 guise of a passenger, a robber might by any one of a thousand advan- 
 tages — which sometimes are created, but always are favoured, by the 
 animation of frank social intercourse — have disarmed the guard . 
 Beyond the Scottish border, the regulation was so far relaxed as to 
 allow oi four outsides, but not relaxed at all as to the mode of plac- 
 ing them. One, as before, was seated on the box, and the other 
 three on the front of the roof, with a determinate and ample separation 
 from the little insulated chair of the guard. This relaxation was con- 
 ceded by way of compensating to Scotland her disadvantages in point 
 of population. England, by the superior density of her population, 
 might always count upon a large fund of profits in the fractional trips of 
 chance passengers riding for short distances of two or three stages. In 
 Scotland this chance counted for much less. And therefore, to make 
 good the deficiency, Scotland was allowed a compensatory profit upon 
 one extra passenger. 
 
60 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 four inside passengers before it could reach ourselves. I 
 remarked to the coachman, with a quotation from Virgil's 
 "^neid " really too hackneyed — 
 
 " Jam proximus ardet 
 Ucalegon." 
 
 But, recollecting that the Virgilian part of the coachman's 
 education might have been neglected, I interpreted so far 
 as to say that perhaps at that moment the flames were 
 catching hold of our worthy brother and inside passenger, 
 Ucalegon. The coachman made no answer, — which is 
 my own way when a stranger addresses me either in Syriac 
 or in Coptic ; but by his faint sceptical smile he seemed 
 to insinuate that he knew better, — for that Ucalegon, as 
 it happened, was not in the way-bill, and therefore could 
 not have booked. 
 
 9. No dignity is perfect which does not at some point 
 ally itself with the mysterious. The connexion of the 
 mail with the state and the executive government — a 
 connexion obvious, but yet not strictly defined — gave to 
 the whole mail establishment an official grandeur which 
 did us service on the roads, and invested us with season- 
 able terrors. Not the less impressive were those terrors 
 because their legal limits were imperfectly ascertained. 
 Look at those turnpike gates : with what deferential 
 hurry, with what an obedient start, they fly open at our 
 approach ! Look at that long line of carts and carters 
 ahead, audaciously usurping the very crest of the road. 
 Ah ! traitors, they do not hear us as yet ; but, as soon as 
 the dreadful blast of our horn reaches them with proc- 
 lamation of our approach, see with what frenzy of 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 6 1 
 
 trepidation they fly to their horses' heads, and deprecate 
 our wrath by the precipitation of their crane-neck quarter- 
 ings. Treason they feel to be their crime ; each individual 
 carter feels himself under the ban of confiscation and 
 attainder ; his blood is attainted through six generations ; 
 and nothing is wanting but the headsman and his axe, 
 the block and the sawdust, to close up the vista of his 
 horrors. What ! shall it be within benefit of clergy° to delay 
 the king's message on the high road? — to interrupt the 
 great respirations, ebb and flood, systole and diastole^ of 
 the national intercourse? — to endanger the safety of 
 tidings running day and night between all nations and 
 languages ? Or can it be fancied, amongst the weakest 
 of men, that the bodies of the criminals will be given up 
 to their widows for Christian burial? Now, the doubts 
 which were raised as to our powers did more to wrap 
 them in terror, by wrapping them in uncertainty, than 
 could have been efl'ected by the sharpest definitions of 
 the law from the Quarter Sessions. We, on our parts (we, 
 the collective mail, I mean), did our utmost to exalt the 
 idea of our privileges by the insolence with which we 
 wielded them. Whether this insolence rested upon law 
 that gave it a sanction, or upon conscious power that 
 haughtily dispensed with that sanction, equally it spoke 
 from a potential station ; and the agent, in each particular 
 insolence of the moment, was viewed reverentially, as 
 one having authority. 
 
 10. Sometimes after breakfast his Majesty's mail would 
 become frisky ; and, in its difficult wheelings amongst the 
 intricacies of early markets, it would upset an apple-cart, 
 a cart loaded with eggs, &c. Huge was the affliction 
 
62 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 and dismay, awful was the smash. I, as far as possible, 
 endeavoured in such a case to represent the conscience 
 and moral sensibilities of the mail ; and, when wildernesses 
 of eggs were lying poached under our horses' hoofs, then 
 would I stretch forth my hands in sorrow, saying (in words 
 too celebrated at that time, from the false echoes^ of 
 Marengo), " Ah ! wherefore have we not time to weep over 
 you?" — which was evidently impossible, since, in fact, 
 we had not time to laugh over them. Tied to post-office 
 allowance, in some cases of fifty minutes for eleven miles, 
 could the royal mail pretend to undertake the offices of 
 sympathy and condolence? Could it be expected to 
 provide tears for the accidents of the road? If even it 
 seemed to trample on humanity, it did so, I felt, in dis- 
 charge of its own more peremptory duties. 
 
 11. Upholding the morality of the mail, a fortiori"^ I 
 upheld its rights ; as a matter of duty, I stretched to the 
 uttermost its privilege of imperial precedency, and 
 astonished weak minds by the feudal powers which I 
 hinted to be lurking constructively in the charters of this 
 proud establishment. Once I remember being on the 
 box of the Holyhead mail, between Shrewsbury and 
 Oswestry, when a tawdry thing from Birmingham, some 
 "Tallyho" or "Highflyer," all flaunting with green and 
 gold, came up alongside of us. What a contrast to our 
 royal simplicity of form and colour in this plebeian wretch ! 
 
 '^" False echoes": — Yes, false! for the words ascribed to Napoleon, 
 as breathed to the memory of Desaix, never were uttered at all. They 
 stand in the same category of theatrical fictions as the cry of the 
 foundering line-of-battle ship Vengeur, as the vaunt of General Cam- 
 bronne at Waterloo, " La Garde meurt, mais ne se rend pas," or as the 
 repartees of Talleyrand. 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 63 
 
 The single ornament on our dark ground of chocolate 
 colour was the mighty shield of the imperial arms, but 
 emblazoned in proportions as modest as a signet-ring 
 bears to a seal of office. Even this was displayed only 
 on a single panel, whispering, rather than proclaiming, 
 our relations to the mighty state ; whilst the beast from 
 Birmingham, our green-and-gold friend from false, 
 fleeting, perjured Brummagem,° had as much writing and 
 painting on its sprawling flanks as would have puzzled a 
 decipherer from the tombs of Luxor. For some time 
 this Birmingham machine ran along by our side — a piece 
 of familiarity that already of itself seemed to me sufficiently 
 jacobinicaL° But all at once a movement of the horses 
 announced a desperate intention of leaving us behind. 
 "Do you see that?'' I said to the coachman. — "I 
 see," was his short answer. He was wide awake, — yet 
 he waited longer than seemed prudent ; for the horses of 
 our audacious opponent had a disagreeable air of freshness 
 and power. But his motive was loyal ; his wish was that 
 the Birmingham conceit should be full-blown before he 
 froze it. When that seemed right, he unloosed, or, to 
 speak by a stronger word, he sprang, his known resources : 
 he slipped our royal horses like cheetahs, or hunting- 
 leopards, after the aff"righted game. How they could 
 retain such a reserve of fiery power after the work they 
 had accomplished seemed hard to explain. But on our 
 side, besides the physical superiority, was a tower of 
 moral strength, namely the king's name, "which they 
 upon the adverse faction wanted." Passing them without 
 an effort, as it seemed, we threw them into the rear with 
 so lengthening an interval between us as proved in itself 
 
64 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 the bitterest mockery of their presumption ; whilst our 
 guard blew back a shattering blast of triumph that was 
 really too painfully full of derision. 
 
 12. I mention this little incident for its connexion 
 with what followed. A Welsh rustic, sitting behind me, 
 asked if I had not felt my heart burn within me during 
 the progress of the race? I said, with philosophic calm- 
 ness, No ; because we were not racing with a mail, so that 
 no glory could be gained. In fact, it was sufficiently 
 mortifying that such a Birmingham thing should dare to 
 challenge us. The Welshman repHed that he didn't see 
 that; for that a cat might look at a king, and a Brummagem 
 coach might lawfully race the Holyhead mail. " Race 
 us, if you like, " I replied, " though even that has an air 
 of sedition; but not beat us. This would have been 
 treason ; and for its own sake I am glad that the ' Tallyho ' 
 was disappointed." So dissatisfied did the Welshman 
 seem with this opinion that at last I was obliged to tell 
 him a very fine story from one of our elder dramatists : 
 viz., that once, in some far Oriental kingdom, when the 
 sultan of all the land, with his princes, ladies, and chief 
 omrahs, were flying their falcons, a hawk suddenly flew 
 at a majestic eagle, and, in defiance of the eagle's natural 
 advantages, in contempt also of the eagle's traditional 
 royalty, and before the whole assembled field of 
 astonished spectators from Agra and Lahore, killed the 
 eagle on the spot. Amazement seized the sultan at the 
 unequal contest, and burning admiration for its unparal- 
 leled result. He commanded that the hawk should be 
 brought before him ; he caressed the bird with enthusiasm ; 
 and he ordered that, for the commemoration of his 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 65 
 
 matchless courage, a diadem of gold and rubies should 
 be solemnly placed on the hawk's head, but then that, 
 immediately after this solemn coronation, the bird should be 
 led off to execution, as the most vahant indeed of traitors, 
 but not the less a traitor, as having dared to rise rebel- 
 liously against his liege lord and anointed sovereign, the 
 eagle. "Now," said I to the Welshman, "to you and me, 
 as men of refined sensibilities, how painful it would have 
 been that this poor Brummagem brute, the ' Tallyho,' in 
 the impossible case of a victory over us, should have been 
 crowned with Birmingham tinsel, with paste diamonds 
 and Roman pearls, and then led off to instant execution." 
 The Welshman doubted if that could be warranted by 
 law. And, when I hinted of the 6th of Edward Long- 
 shanks, chap. 18, for regulating the precedency of coaches, 
 as being probably the statute rehed on for the capital 
 punishment of such offences, he repHed drily that, if the 
 attempt to pass a mail really were treasonable, it was a 
 pity that the "Tallyho " appeared to have so imperfect 
 an acquaintance with law. 
 
 13. The modern modes of travelling cannot compare 
 with the old mail-coach system in grandeur and power. 
 They boast of more velocity, — not, however, as a con- 
 sciousness, but as a fact of our hfeless knowledge, resting 
 upon alien evidence : as, for instance, because somebody 
 says that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, though we 
 are far from feeling it as a personal experience ; or upon 
 the evidence of a result, as that actually we find ourselves 
 in York four hours after leaving London. Apart from such 
 an assertion, or such a result, I myself am little aware of 
 the pace. But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed 
 
66 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity. On 
 this system the word was not magna loquimur° as upon 
 railways, but vivinius. Yes, " magna vivimus " ° ; we do 
 not make verbal ostentation of our grandeurs, we realise 
 our grandeurs in act, and in the very experience of life. 
 The vital experience of the glad animal sensibilities made 
 doubts impossible on the question of our speed ; we heard 
 our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling ; and this 
 speed was not the product of bhnd insensate agencies, that 
 had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery 
 eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated 
 nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunderbeating hoofs. 
 The sensibility of the horse uttering itself in the maniac 
 light of his eye, might be the last vibration of such a 
 movement ; the glory of Salamanca might be the first. 
 But the intervening links that connected them, that 
 spread the earthquake of battle into the eyeballs of the 
 horse, were the heart of man and its electric thrillings — 
 kindling in the rapture of the fiery strife, and then propa- 
 gating its own tumults by contagious shouts and gestures 
 to the heart of his servant the horse. But now, on the 
 new system of travelling, iron tubes and boilers have dis- 
 connected man's heart from the ministers of his locomo- 
 tion. Nile nor Trafalgar has power to raise an extra 
 bubble in a steam-kettle. The galvanic cycle is broken 
 up for ever ; man's imperial nature no longer sends itself 
 forward through the electric sensibility of the horse ; the 
 inter-agencies are gone in the mode of communication 
 between the horse and his master out of which grew so 
 many aspects of subhmity under accidents of mists that 
 hid, or sudden blazes that revealed, of mobs that agi- 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 67 
 
 tated, or midnight solitudes that awed. Tidings fitted to 
 convulse all nations must henceforwards travel by culi- 
 nary process °j and the trumpet that once announced 
 from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking when heard 
 screaming on the wind and proclaiming itself through the 
 darkness to every village or solitary house on its route, 
 has now given way for ever to the pot-wallopings of the 
 boiler. Thus have perished multiform openings for pub- 
 lic expressions of interest, scenical yet natural, in great 
 national tidings, — for revelations of faces and groups that 
 could not offer themselves amongst the fluctuating mobs 
 of a railway station. The gatherings of gazers about a 
 laurelled mail had one centre, and acknowledged one sole 
 interest. But the crowds attending at a railway station 
 have as little unity as running water, and own as many 
 centres as there are separate carriages in the train. 
 
 14. How else, for example, than as a constant watcher 
 for the dawn, and for the London mail that in summer 
 months entered about daybreak amongst the lawny thick- 
 ets of Marlborough forest, couldst thou, sweet Fanny 
 of the Bath road, have become the glorified inmate of 
 my dreams ? Yet Fanny, as the loveliest young woman for 
 face and person that perhaps in my whole life I have be- 
 held, merited the station which even now, from a distance 
 of forty years, she holds in my dreams ; yes, though by links 
 of natural association she brings along with her a troop of 
 dreadful creatures, fabulous and not fabulous, that are 
 more abominable to the heart than Fanny and the dawn 
 are delightful. 
 
 15. Miss Fanny of the Bath road, strictly speaking, lived 
 at a mile's distance from that road, but came so continually 
 
6S THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 to meet the mail that I on my frequent transits rarely 
 missed her, and naturally connected her image with the 
 great thoroughfare where only I had ever seen her. Why 
 she came so punctually I do not exactly know ; but I 
 beUeve with some burden of commissions, to be executed 
 in Bath, which had gathered to her own residence as a 
 central rendezvous for converging them. The mail-coach- 
 man who drove the Bath mail and wore the royal livery ^ 
 happened to be Fanny's grandfather. A good man he 
 was, that loved his beautiful granddaughter, and, loving 
 her wisely, was vigilant over her deportment in any case 
 where young Oxford might happen to be concerned. Did 
 my vanity then suggest that I myself, individually, could 
 fall within the line of his terrors? Certainly not, as re- 
 garded any physical pretensions that I could plead ; for 
 Fanny (as a chance passenger from her own neighbourhood 
 once told me) counted in her train a hundred and ninety- 
 nine professed admirers, if not open aspirants to her 
 favour ; and probably not one of the whole brigade but 
 excelled myself in personal advantages. Ulysses even, 
 with the unfair advantage of his accursed bow, could 
 hardly have undertaken that amount of suitors. So the 
 danger might have seemed slight — only that woman is 
 universally aristocratic ; it is amongst her nobilities of 
 
 1" IVore the royal livery": — The general impression was that the 
 royal livery belonged of right to the mail-coachmen as their professional 
 dress. But that was an error. To the guard it did belong, I believe, 
 and was obviously essential as an official warrant, and as a means of in- 
 stant identification for his person, in the discharge of his important 
 public duties. But the coachman, and especially if his place in the 
 series did not connect him immediately with London and the General 
 Post-Office, obtained the scarlet coat only as an honorary distinction 
 after long (or, if not long, trying and special) service. 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 69 
 
 heart that she is so. Now, the aristocratic distinctions in 
 my favour might easily with Miss Fanny have compensated 
 my physical deficiencies. Did I then make love to Fanny ? 
 Why, yes ; about as much love as one could make whilst 
 the mail was changing horses — a process which, ten years 
 later, did not occupy above eighty seconds ; but then, — 
 viz., about Waterloo — it occupied five times eighty. 
 Now, four hundred seconds offer a field quite ample enough 
 for whispering into a young woman's ear a great deal of 
 truth, and (by way of parenthesis) some trifle of falsehood. 
 Grandpapa did right, therefore, to watch me. And yet, 
 as happens too often to the grandpapas of earth in a con- 
 test with the admirers of granddaughters, how vainly would 
 he have watched me had I meditated any evil whispers 
 to Fanny ! She, it is my behef, would have protected her- 
 self against any man's evil suggestions. But he, as the 
 result showed, could not have intercepted the opportunities 
 for such suggestions. Yet, why not ? Was he not active ? 
 Was he not blooming? Blooming he was as Fanny her- 
 self. 
 
 " Say, all our praises ° why should lords " 
 
 Stop, that's not the line. 
 
 " Say, all our roses why should girls engross? " 
 
 The coachman showed rosy blossoms on his face deeper 
 even than his granddaughter's — his being drawn from 
 the ale-cask, Fanny's from the fountains of the dawn. But, 
 in spite of his blooming face, some infirmities he had ; and 
 one particularly in which he too much resembled a croco- 
 dile. This lay in a monstrous inaptitude for turning 
 
70 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 round. The crocodile, I presume, owes that inaptitude 
 to the absurd length of his back ; but in our girandpapa it 
 arose rather from the absurd breadth of his back, com- 
 bined, possibly, with some growing stiffness in his legs. 
 Now, upon this crocodile infirmity of his I planted a human 
 advantage for tendering my homage to Miss Fanny. In 
 defiance of all his honourable vigilance, no sooner had he 
 presented to us his mighty Jovian back (what a field for 
 displaying to mankind his royal scarlet !), whilst inspecting 
 professionally the buckles, the straps, and the silvery tur- 
 rets ^ of his harness, than I raised Miss Fanny's hand to my 
 lips, and, by the mixed tenderness and respectfulness of 
 my manner, caused her easily to understand how happy it 
 would make me to rank upon her hst as No. loor 12 : in 
 which case a few casualties among her lovers (and, ob- 
 serve, they hanged liberally in those days) might have 
 promoted me speedily to the top of the tree ; as, on the 
 other hand, with how much loyalty of submission I ac- 
 quiesced by anticipation in her award, supposing that she 
 should plant me in the very rearward of her favour, as No. 
 199 + I. Most truly I loved this beautiful and ingenuous 
 girl \ and, had it not been for the Bath mail, timing all 
 courtships by post-office allowance, heaven only knows 
 what might have come of it. People talk of being over 
 head and ears in love ; now, the mail was the cause that I 
 
 '^''Turrets": — As one who loves and venerates Chaucer for his un- 
 rivalled merits of tenderness, of picturesque characterisation, and of 
 narrative skill, I noticed with great pleasure that the word torrefies is 
 used by him to designate the little devices through which the reins are 
 made to pass. This same word, in the same exact sense, I heard uniformly- 
 used by many scores of illustrious mail-coachmen to whose confidential 
 friendship I had the honour of being admitted in my younger days. 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 71 
 
 sank only over ears in love, — which, you know, still left 
 a trifle of brain to overlook the whole conduct of the affair. 
 16. Ah, reader ! when I look back upon those days, it 
 seems to me that all things change — all things perish. 
 " Perish the roses and the palms of kings " : perish even 
 the crowns and trophies of Waterloo : thunder and hght- 
 ning are not the thunder and hghtning which I remember. 
 Roses are degenerating. The Fannies of our island — 
 though this I say with reluctance — are not visibly improv- 
 ing; and the Bath road is notoriously superannuated. 
 Crocodiles, you will say, are stationary. Mr. Waterton tells 
 me that the crocodile does no^cha.nge, — that a cayman,° 
 in fact, or an alligator, is just as good for riding upon as 
 he was in the time of the Pharaohs. T/ia^ may be ; but 
 the reason is that the crocodile does not live fast — he is 
 a slow coach. I believe it is generally understood among 
 naturalists that the crocodile is a blockhead. It is my 
 own impression that the Pharaohs were also blockheads. 
 Now, as the Pharaohs and the crocodile domineered over 
 Egyptian society, this accounts for a singular mistake that 
 prevailed through innumerable generations on the Nile. 
 The crocodile made the ridiculous blunder of supposing 
 man to be meant chiefly for his own eating. Man, taking 
 a different view of the subject, naturafly met that mis- 
 take by another : he viewed the crocodile as a thing some- 
 times to worship, but always to run away from. And this 
 continued till Mr. Waterton^ changed the relations be- 
 
 i"A/r. Waterton": — Had the reader lived through the last genera- 
 tion, he would not need to be told that, some thirty or thirty-five years 
 back, Mr. Waterton, a distinguished country gentleman of ancient fam- 
 ily in Northumberland, publicly mounted and rode in top-boots a sav- 
 
72 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 tween the animals. The mode of escaping from the rep- 
 tile he showed to be not by running away, but by leaping 
 on its back booted and spurred. The two animals had 
 misunderstood each other. The use of the crocodile has 
 now been cleared up — viz., to be ridden ; and the final 
 cause of man is that he may improve the health of the croco- 
 dile by riding him a-fox-hunting before breakfast. And 
 it is pretty certain that any crocodile who has been regu- 
 larly hunted through the season, and is master of the 
 weight he carries, will take a six-barred gate now as well 
 as ever he would have done in the infancy of the pyramids. 
 17. If, therefore, the crocodile does not change, all 
 things else undeniably do: even the shadow of the 
 pyramids grows less. And often the restoration in vision 
 of Fanny and the Bath road makes me too pathetically 
 sensible of that truth. Out of the darkness, if I happen 
 to call back the image of Fanny, up rises suddenly from 
 a gulf of forty years a rose in June ; or, if I think for an 
 instant of the rose in June, up rises the heavenly face of 
 Fanny. One after the other, like the antiphonies in the 
 choral service, rise Fanny and the rose in June, then 
 back again the rose in June and Fanny. Then come 
 both together, as in a chorus — roses and Fannies, 
 Fannies and roses, without end, thick as blossoms in 
 paradise. Then comes a venerable crocodile, in a royal 
 livery of scarlet and gold, with sixteen capes ; and the 
 
 age old crocodile, that was restive and very impertinent, but all to no 
 purpose. The crocodile jibbed and tried to kick, but vainly. He was 
 no more able to throw the squire than Sinbad was to throw the old 
 scoundrel who used his back without paying for it, until he discovered 
 a mode (slightly immoral, perhaps, though some think not) of murder- 
 ing the old fraudulent jockey, and so circuitously of unhorsing him. 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 73 
 
 crocodile is driving four-in-hand from the box of the 
 Bath mail. And suddenly we upon the mail are pulled 
 up by a mighty dial, sculptured with the hours, that 
 mingle with the heavens and the heavenly host. Then 
 all at once we are arrived at Marlborough forest, amongst 
 the lovely households ^ of the roe-deer ; the deer and 
 their fawns retire into the dewy thickets ; the thickets 
 are rich with roses ; once again the roses call up the 
 sweet countenance of Fanny ; and she, being the grand- 
 daughter of a crocodile, awakens a dreadful host of semi- 
 legendary animals — griffins, dragons, basilisks, sphinxes 
 — till at length the whole vision of fighting images 
 crowds into one towering armorial shield, a vast em- 
 blazonry of human charities and human loveliness that 
 have perished, but quartered heraldically with unutterable 
 and demoniac natures, whilst over all rises, as a sur- 
 mounting crest, one fair female hand, with the forefinger 
 pointing, in sweet, sorrowful admonition, upwards to 
 heaven, where is sculptured the eternal writing which 
 proclaims the frailty of earth and her children. 
 
 Going Down With Victory 
 
 18. But the grandest chapter of our experience within 
 the whole mail-coach service was on those occasions 
 when we went down from London with the news of 
 
 '^'■'Households" : — Roe-deer do not congregate in herds like the 
 fallow or the red deer, but by separate families, parents and children; 
 which feature of approximation to the sanctity of human hearths, added 
 to their comparatively miniature and graceful proportions, conciliates 
 to them an interest of peculiar tenderness, supposing even that this 
 beautiful creature is less characteristically impressed with the grandeurs 
 of savage and forest life. 
 
74 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 victory. A period of about ten years stretched from 
 Trafalgar to Waterloo; the second and third years of 
 which period (1806 and 1807) were comparatively sterile ; 
 but the other nine (from 1805 to 18 15 inclusively) fur- 
 nished a long succession of victories, the least of which, in 
 such a contest of Titans, had an inappreciable value of 
 position : partly for its absolute interference with the 
 plans of our enemy, but still more from its keeping alive 
 through central Europe the sense of a deep-seated vul- 
 nerability in France. Even to tease the coasts of our 
 enemy, to mortify them by continual blockades, to insult 
 them by capturing if it were but a baubling schooner 
 under the eyes of their arrogant armies, repeated from 
 time to time a sullen proclamation of power lodged in 
 one quarter to which the hopes of Christendom turned 
 in secret. How much more loudly must this proclama- 
 tion have spoken in the audacity^ of having bearded the 
 elite of their troops, and having beaten them in pitched 
 battles ! Five years of life it was worth paying down for 
 the privilege of an outside place on a mail-coach, when 
 
 '^"Audacity" : — Such the French accounted it; and it has struck 
 me that Soult would not have been so popular in London, at the period 
 of her present Majesty's coronation, or in Manchester, on occasion of 
 his visit to that town, if they had been aware of the insolence with which 
 he spoke of us in notes written at intervals from the field of Waterloo. 
 As though it had been mere felony in our array to look a French one 
 in the face, he said in more notes than one, dated from two to four P.M. 
 on the field of Waterloo, " Here are the English — we have them ; they 
 are caught en fiagrant delit." Yet no man should have known us better ; 
 no man had drunk deeper from the cup of humiliation than Soult had 
 in 1809, when ejected by us with headlong violence from Oporto, and 
 pursued through a long line of wrecks to the frontier of Spain ; and 
 subsequently at Albuera, in the bloodiest of recorded battles, to say 
 nothing of Toulouse, he should have learned our pretensions. 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 75 
 
 carrying down the first tidings of any such event. And 
 it is to be noted that, from our insular situation, and the 
 multitude of our frigates disposable for the rapid trans- 
 mission of intelligence, rarely did any unauthorised 
 rumour steal away a prelibation from the first aroma of 
 the regular despatches. The government news was gen- 
 erally the earliest news. 
 
 19. From eight p.m. to fifteen or twenty minutes later 
 imagine the mails assembled on parade in Lombard 
 Street ; where, at that time,^ and not in St. Martin's-le- 
 Grand, was seated the General Post-Office. In what 
 exact strength we mustered I do not remember ; but, 
 from the length of each separate attelage° we filled the 
 street, though a long one, and though we were drawn up 
 in double file. On any night the spectacle was beauti- 
 ful. The absolute perfection of all the appointments 
 about the carriages and the harness, their strength, their 
 briUiant cleanliness, their beautiful simplicity — but, more 
 than all, the royal magnificence of the horses — were 
 what might first have fixed the attention. Every carriage 
 on every morning in the year was taken down to an 
 official inspector for examination : wheels, axles, linch- 
 pins, pole, glasses, lamps, were all critically probed and 
 tested. Every part of every carriage had been cleaned, 
 every horse had been groomed, with as much rigour as if 
 they belonged to a private gentleman ; and that part of 
 the spectacle offered itself always. But the night before 
 us is a night of victory ; and, behold ! to the ordinary dis- 
 play what a heart-shaking addition ! — horses, men, car- 
 riages, all are dressed in laurels and flowers, oak-leaves 
 1 "At that time ": — I speak of the era previous to Waterloo. 
 
^6 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 and ribbons. The guards, as being officially his Majesty's 
 servants, and of the coachmen such as are within the 
 privilege of the post-office, wear the royal liveries of 
 course ; and, as it is summer (for all the /and victories 
 were naturally won in summer), they wear, on this fine 
 evening, these liveries exposed to view, without any 
 covering of upper coats. Such a costume, and the 
 elaborate arrangement of the laurels in their hats, dilate 
 their hearts, by giving to them openly a personal connex- 
 ion with the great news in which already they have the 
 general interest of patriotism. That great national senti- 
 ment surmounts and quells all sense of ordinary distinc- 
 tions. Those passengers who happen to be gentlemen 
 are now hardly to be distinguished as such except by 
 dress ; for the usual reserve of their manner in speak- 
 ing to the attendants has on this night melted away. 
 One heart, one pride, one glory, connects every man . by 
 the transcendent bond of his national blood. The spec- 
 tators, who are numerous beyond precedent, express 
 their sympathy with these fervent feelings by continual 
 hurrahs. Every moment are shouted aloud by the post- 
 office servants, and summoned to draw up, the great 
 ancestral names of cities known to history through a 
 thousand years — Lincoln, Winchester, Portsmouth, 
 Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, York, Newcastle, 
 Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Stirling, Aberdeen — express- 
 ing the grandeur of the empire by the antiquity of its 
 towns, and the grandeur of the mail establishment by the 
 diffusive radiation of its separate missions. Every mo- 
 ment you hear the thunder of lids locked down upon the 
 mail-bags. That sound to each individual mail is the 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH yj 
 
 signal for drawing off; which process is the finest part 
 of the entire spectacle. Then come the horses into play. 
 Horses ! can these be horses that bound off with the 
 action and gestures of leopards ? What stir ! — what sea- 
 like ferment ! — what a thundering of wheels ! — what a 
 trampling of hoofs ! — what a sounding of trumpets ! — 
 what farewell cheers — what redoubling peals of brotherly 
 congratulation, connecting the name of the particular 
 mail — " Liverpool forever ! " — with the name of the 
 particular victory — " Badajoz forever ! " or "Salamanca 
 forever ! " The half-slumbering consciousness that all- 
 night long, and all the next day — perhaps for even a 
 longer period — many of these mails, like fire racing 
 along a train of gunpowder, will be kindling at every in- 
 stant new successions of burning joy, has an obscure 
 effect of multiplying the victory itself, by multiplying to 
 the imagination into infinity the stages of its progressive 
 diffusion. A fiery arrow seems to be let loose, which 
 from that moment is destined to travel, without intermis- 
 sion, westwards for three hundred ^ miles — northwards 
 for six hundred; and the sympathy of our Lombard 
 Street friends at parting is exalted a hundredfold by a 
 sort of visionary sympathy with the yet slumbering sym- 
 pathies which in so vast a succession we are going to 
 awake. 
 
 1 " Three hundred" : — Oi necessity, this scale of measurement, to an 
 American, if he happens to.be a thoughtless man, must sound ludicrous. 
 Accordingly, I remember a case in which an American writer indulges 
 himself in the luxury of a little fibbing, by ascribing to an Englishman 
 a pompous account of the Thames, constructed entirely upon American 
 ideas of grandeur, and concluding in something like these terms : — 
 " And, sir, arriving at London, this mighty father of rivers attains a 
 
^8 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 20. Liberated from the embarrassments of the city, and 
 issuing into the broad uncrowded avenues of the northern 
 suburbs, we soon begin to enter upon our natural pace 
 of ten miles an hour. In the broad light of the summer 
 evening, the sun, perhaps, only just at the point of setting, 
 we are seen from every storey of every house. Heads of 
 every age crowd to the windows ; young and old under- 
 stand the language of our victorious symbols ; and rolling 
 volleys of sympathising cheers run along us, behind us, and 
 before us. The beggar, rearing himself against the wall, 
 
 breadth of at least two furlongs, having, in its winding course traversed 
 the astonishing distance of one hundred and seventy miles." And 
 this the candid American thinks it fair to contrast with the scale of 
 the Mississippi. Now, it is hardly worth while to answer a pure fiction 
 gravely; else one might say that no Englishman out of Bedlam ever 
 thought of looking in an island for the rivers of a continent, nor, con- 
 sequently, could have thought of looking for the peculiar grandeur of 
 the Thames in the length of its course, or in the extent of soil which it 
 drains. Yet, if he kad been so absurd, the American might have 
 recollected that a river, not to be compared with the Thames even as 
 to volume of water — viz. the Tiber — has contrived to make itself 
 heard of in this world for twenty-five centuries to an extent not reached 
 as yet by any river, however corpulent, of his own land. The glory of 
 the Thames is measured by the density of the population to which it 
 ministers, by the commerce which it supports, by the grandeur of the 
 empire in which, though far from the largest, it is the most influential 
 stream. Upon some such scale, and not by a transfer of Columbian 
 standards, is the course of our English mails to be valued. The 
 American may fancy the effect of his own valuations to our English 
 ears by supposing the case of a Siberian glorifying his country in 
 these terms : — " These v^Tetches, sir, in France and England, cannot 
 march half a mile in any direction without finding a house where food 
 can be had and lodging ; whereas such is the noble desolation of our mag- 
 nificent country that in many a direction for a thousand miles I will en- 
 gage that a dog shall not find shelter from a snow-storm, nor a wren 
 find an apology for breakfast." 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 79 
 
 forgets his lameness — real or assumed — thinks not 
 of his whining trade, but stands erect, with bold exult- 
 ing smiles, as we pass him. The victory has healed 
 him, and says, Be thou whole ! Women and children, 
 from garrets alike and cellars, through infinite London, 
 look down or look up with loving eyes upon our gay rib- 
 bons and our martial laurels; sometimes kiss their 
 hands ; sometimes hang out, as signals of affection, 
 pocket-handkerchiefs, aprons, dusters, anything that, by 
 catching the summer breezes, will express an aerial jubi- 
 lation. On the London side of Barnet,° to which we 
 draw near within a few minutes after nine, observe that 
 private carriage which is approaching us. The weather 
 being so warm, the glasses are all down ; and one may 
 read, as on the stage of a theatre, everything that goes on 
 within. It contains three ladies — one Hkely to be 
 " mamma," and two of seventeen or eighteen, who are proba- 
 bly her daughters. What lovely animation, what beautiful 
 unpremeditated pantomime, explaining to us every sylla- 
 ble that passes, in these ingenuous girls ! By the sudden 
 start and raising of the hands on first discovering our 
 laurelled equipage, by the sudden movement and appeal 
 to the elder lady from both of them, and by the 
 heightened colour on their animated countenances, we 
 can almost hear them saying, " See, see ! Look at their 
 laurels ! Oh, mamma ! there has been a great battle in 
 Spain ; and it has been a great victory." In a moment we are 
 on the point of passing them. We passengers — I on the 
 box, and the two on the roof behind me — raise our hats to 
 the ladies ; the coachman makes his professional salute 
 with the whip ; the guard even, though punctilious on 
 
80 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 the matter of his dignity as an officer under the crown, 
 touches his hat. The ladies move to us, in return, with a 
 winning graciousness of gesture ; all smile on each side 
 in a way that nobody could misunderstand, and that 
 nothing short of a grand national sympathy could so in- 
 stantaneously prompt. Will these ladies say that we 
 are nothing to them? Oh no ; they will not say that. 
 They cannot deny — they do not deny — that for this 
 night they are our sisters ; gentle or simple, scholar or 
 illiterate servant, for twelve hours to come, we on the 
 outside have the honour to be their brothers. Those 
 poor women, again, who stop to gaze upon us with de- 
 hght at the entrance of Barnet, and seem, by their air 
 of weariness, to be returning from labour — do you 
 mean to say that they are washerwomen and charwomen°? 
 Oh, my poor friend, you are quite mistaken. I assure 
 you they stand in a far higher rank ; for this one night 
 they feel themselves by birthright to be daughters of 
 England, and answer to no humbler title. 
 
 21. Every joy, however, even rapturous joy — such is the 
 sad law of earth — may carry with it grief, or fear of grief, 
 to some. Three miles beyond Barnet, we see approach- 
 ing us another private carriage, nearly repeating the 
 circumstances of the former case. Here, also, the glasses 
 are all down : here, also, is an elderly lady seated ] but 
 the two daughters are missing : for the single young per- 
 son sitting by the lady's side seems to be an attendant — 
 so I judge from her dress, and her air of respectful reserve. 
 The lady is in mourning ; and her countenance expresses 
 sorrow. At first she does not look up ; so that I beheve 
 she is not aware of our approach, until she hears the 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 8 1 
 
 measured beating of our horses' hoofs. Then she raises 
 her eyes to settle them painfully on our triumphal equipage. 
 Our decorations explain the case to her at once ; but she 
 beholds them with apparent anxiety, or even with terror. 
 Some time before this, I, finding it difficult to hit a flying 
 mark when embarrassed by the coachman's person and 
 reins intervening, had given to the guard a " Courier " 
 evening paper, containing the gazette," for the next 
 carriage that might pass. Accordingly he tossed it in, so 
 folded that the huge capitals expressing some such legend 
 as GLORIOUS VICTORY might catch the eye at once. To 
 see the paper, however, at all, interpreted as it was by 
 our ensigns of triumph, explained everything; and, if the 
 guard were right in thinking the lady to have received it 
 with a gesture of horror, it could not be doubtful that she 
 had suffered some deep personal affliction in connexion 
 with this Spanish war. 
 
 22. Here, now, was the case of one who, having formerly 
 suffered, might, erroneously perhaps, be distressing her- 
 self with anticipations of another similar suffering. That 
 same night, and hardly three hours later, occurred the re- 
 verse case. A poor woman, who too probably would find 
 herself, in a day or two, to have suffered the heaviest of afflic- 
 tions by the battle, blindly allowed herself to express an ex- 
 ultation so unmeasured in the news and its details as gave 
 to her the appearance which amongst Celtic Highlanders is 
 ca.\\ed/ey.° This was at some little town where we changed 
 horses an hour or two after midnight. Some fair or wake 
 had kept the people up out of their beds, and had 
 occasioned a partial illumination of the stalls and booths, 
 presenting an unusual but very impressive effect. We 
 
82 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 saw many lights moving about as we drew near ; and per- 
 haps the most striking scene on the whole route was our 
 reception at this place. The flashing of torches and the 
 beautiful radiance of blue lights (technically, Bengal lights) 
 upon the heads of our horses ; the fine effect of such a 
 showery and ghostly illumination faUing upon our flowers 
 and glittering laurels^; whilst all around ourselves, that 
 formed a centre of light, the darkness gathered on the 
 rear and flanks in massy blackness : these optical splen- 
 dours, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of the 
 people, composed a picture at once scenical and affecting, 
 theatrical and holy. As we staid for three or four minutes, 
 I alighted ; and immediately from a dismantled stall in 
 the street, where no doubt she had been presiding through 
 the earlier part of the night, advanced eagerly a middle- 
 aged woman. The sight of my newspaper it was that had 
 drawn her attention upon myself. The victory which we 
 were carrying down to the provinces on this occasion was 
 the imperfect one of Talavera° — imperfect for its results, 
 such was the virtual treachery of the Spanish general, 
 Cuesta, but not imperfect in its ever-memorable heroism. 
 I told her the main outHne of the battle. The agitation 
 of her enthusiasm had been so conspicuous when listening, 
 and when first applying for information, that I could not 
 but ask her if she had not some relative in the Peninsular 
 army. Oh yes ; her only son was there. In what regi- 
 ment? He was a trooper in the 23d Dragoons. My 
 heart sank within me as she made that answer. This 
 
 "^"Glittering laurels":— I must observe that the colour of green 
 suffers almost a spiritual change and exaltation under the effect of 
 Bengal lights. 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 8$ 
 
 sublime regiment, which an Englishman should never men- 
 tion without raising his hat to their memory, had made 
 the most memorable and effective charge recorded in 
 military annals. They leaped their horses — over sl trench 
 where they could ; in/o it, and with the result of death 
 or mutilation, when they could noL What proportion 
 cleared the trench is nowhere stated. Those who di^/ 
 closed up and went down upon the enemy with such 
 divinity of fervour (I use the word divinity by design : 
 the inspiration of God must have prompted this movement 
 for those whom even then He was calHng to His presence) 
 that two results followed. As regarded the enemy, this 
 23d Dragoons, not, I believe, originally three hundred and 
 fifty strong, paralysed a French column six thousand 
 strong, then ascended the hill, and fixed the gaze of the 
 whole French army. As regarded themselves, the 23d 
 were supposed at first to have been barely not annihilated ; 
 but eventually, I believe, about one in four survived. And 
 this, then, was the regiment — a regiment already for 
 some hours glorified and hallowed to the ear of all London, 
 as lying stretched, by a large majority, upon one bloody 
 aceldama ° — in which the young trooper served whose 
 mother was now talking in a spirit of such joyous en- 
 thusiasm. Did I tell her the truth? Had I the heart 
 to break up her dreams? No. To-morrow, said I to 
 myself — to-morrow, or the next day, will publish the 
 worst. For one night more wherefore should she not 
 sleep in peace? After to-morrow the chances are too 
 many that peace will forsake her pillow. This brief res- 
 pite, then, let her owe to my gift and my forbearance. 
 But, if I told her not of the bloody price that had been 
 
84 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 paid, not therefore was I silent on the contributions from 
 her son's regiment to that day's service and glory. I 
 showed her not the funeral banners under which the noble 
 regiment was sleeping. I lifted not the overshadowing 
 laurels from the bloody trench in which horse and rider 
 lay mangled together. But I told her how these dear 
 children of England, officers and privates, had leaped their 
 horses over all obstacles as gaily as hunters to the morn- 
 ing's chase. I told her how they rode their horses into 
 the midst of death, — saying to myself, but not saying to 
 her, " and laid down their young lives for thee, O mother 
 England ! as willingly — poured out their noble blood as 
 cheerfully — as ever, after a long day's sport, when infants, 
 they had rested their weary heads upon their mother's 
 knees, or had sunk to sleep in her arms." Strange it is, 
 yet true, that she seemed to have no fears for her son's 
 safety, even after this knowledge that the 23d Dragoons 
 had been memorably engaged ; but so much was she en- 
 raptured by the knowledge that his regiment, and there- 
 fore that he, had rendered conspicuous service in the 
 dreadful conflict — a service which had actually made 
 them, within the last twelve hours, the foremost topic of 
 conversation in London — so absolutely was fear swal- 
 lowed up in joy — that, in the mere simplicity of her 
 fervent nature, the poor woman threw her arms round my 
 neck, as she thought of her son, and gave to me the kiss 
 which secretly was meant for hi7n. 
 
 Section the Second — The Vision of Sudden Death 
 
 23. What is to be taken as the predominant opinion of 
 man, reflective and philosophic, upon sudden death? It 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 85 
 
 is remarkable that, in different conditions of society, sud- 
 den death has been variously regarded as the consumma- 
 tion ° of an earthly career most fervently to be desired, or, 
 again, as that consummation which is with most horror to 
 be deprecated. Caesar the Dictator, at his last dinner- 
 party (ccend), on the very evening before his assassination, 
 when the minutes of his earthly career were numbered, 
 being asked what death, in his judgment, might be pro- 
 nounced the most eligible, replied " That which should be 
 most sudden." On the other hand, the divine Litany of 
 our English Church, when breathing forth supplications, 
 as if in some representative character, for the whole human 
 race prostrate before God, places such a death in the very 
 van of horrors : " From lightning and tempest ; from 
 plague, pestilence, and famine ; from battle and murder, 
 and from sudden death — Good Lord, deliver us. " Sud- 
 den death is here made to crown the cHmax in a grand 
 ascent of calamities ; it is ranked among the last of curses ; 
 and yet by the noblest of Romans ° it was ranked as the first 
 of blessings. In that difference most readers will see little 
 more than the essential difference between Christianity 
 and Paganism. But this, on consideration, I doubt. The 
 Christian Church may be right in its estimate of sudden 
 death ; and it is a natural feeling, though after all it may 
 also be an infirm one, to wish for a quiet dismissal from 
 life, as that which seems most reconcilable with meditation, 
 with penitential retrospects, and with the humihties of 
 farewell prayer. There does not, however, occur to me 
 any direct scriptural warrant for this earnest petition of 
 the English Litany unless under a special construction of 
 the word " sudden." It seems a petition indulged rather 
 
S6 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 and conceded to human infirmity than exacted from human 
 piety. It is not so much a doctrine built upon the eterni- 
 ties of the Christian system as a plausible opinion built 
 upon special varieties of physical temperament. Let that, 
 however, be as it may, two remarks suggest themselves as 
 prudent restraints upon a doctrine which else may wander, 
 and has wandered, into an uncharitable superstition. The 
 first is this : that many people are likely to exaggerate the 
 horror of a sudden death from the disposition to lay a false 
 stress upon words or acts simply because by an accident 
 they have become Jina/ words or acts. If a man dies, for 
 instance, by some sudden death when he happens to be 
 intoxicated, such a death is falsely regarded with pecuhar 
 horror ; as though the intoxication were suddenly exalted 
 into a blasphemy. But fkat is unphilosophic. The man 
 was, or he was not, habitually a drunkard. If not, if his 
 intoxication were a soHtary accident, there can be no 
 reason for allowing special emphasis to this act simply be- 
 cause through misfortune it became his final act. Nor, 
 on the other hand, if it were no accident, but one of 
 his habitual transgressions, will it be the more habitual 
 or the more a transgression because some sudden calam- 
 ity, surprising him, has caused this habitual transgression 
 to be also a final one. Could the man have had any 
 reason even dimly to foresee his own sudden death, there 
 would have been a new feature in his act of intemperance 
 — a feature of presumption and irreverence, as in one 
 that, having known himself drawing near to the pres- 
 ence of God, should have suited his demeanour to an 
 expectation so awful. But this is no part of the case 
 supposed. And the only new element in the man's 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 8/ 
 
 act is not any element of special immorality, but simply 
 of special misfortune. 
 
 24. The other remark has reference to the meaning 
 of the word sudden. Very possibly Caesar and the 
 Christian Church do not differ in the way supposed, — ■ 
 that is, do not differ by any difference of doctrine as 
 between Pagan and Christian views of the moral temper 
 appropriate to death ; but perhaps they are contemplating 
 different cases. Both contemplate a violent death, a 
 Bia^amTos° — ^ death that is /?tatos, or, in other words, 
 death that is brought about, not by internal and spontaneous 
 change, but by active force having its origin from without. 
 In this meaning the two authorities agree. Thus far they 
 are in harmony. But the difference is that the Roman by 
 the word " sudden " means un lingering, whereas the Chris- 
 tian Litany by " sudden death " means a death without 
 warning, consequently without any available summons to 
 religious preparation. The poor mutineer who kneels 
 down to gather into his heart the bullets from twelve 
 firelocks of his pitying comrades dies by a most sudden 
 death in Caesar's sense ; one shock, one mighty spasm, 
 one (possibly not one) groan, and all is over. But, in 
 the sense of the Litany, the mutineer's death is far from 
 sudden : his offence originally, his imprisonment, his trial, 
 the interval between his sentence and its. execution, 
 having all furnished him with separate warnings of his 
 fate — having all summoned him to meet it with solemn 
 preparation. 
 
 25. Here at once, in this sharp verbal distinction, we 
 comprehend the faithful earnestness with which a holy 
 Christian Church pleads on behalf of her poor departing 
 
88 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 children that God would vouchsafe to them the last great 
 privilege and distinction possible on a death-bed, viz., 
 the opportunity of untroubled preparation for facing this 
 mighty trial. Sudden death, as a mere variety in the 
 modes of dying where death in some shape is inevitable, 
 proposes a question of choice which, equally in the Roman 
 and the Christian sense, will be variously answered accord- 
 ing to each man's variety of temperament. Meantime, 
 one aspect of sudden death there is, one modification, 
 upon which no doubt can arise, that of all martyrdoms 
 it is the most agitating — viz., where it surprises a man 
 under circumstances which offer (or which seem to offer) 
 some hurrying, flying, inappreciably minute chance of 
 evading it.° Sudden as the danger which it affronts 
 must be any effort by which such an evasion can be 
 accomplished. Even f/zaf, even the sickening ne- 
 cessity for hurrying in extremity where all hurry seems 
 destined to be vain, — even that anguish is liable to a 
 hideous exasperation in one particular case : viz., where 
 the appeal is made not exclusively to the instinct of 
 self-preservation, but to the conscience, on behalf of some 
 other life besides your own, accidentally thrown upon 
 your protection. To fail, to collapse in a service merely 
 your own, might seem comparatively venial ; though, in 
 fact, it is far from venial. But to fail in a case where 
 Providence has suddenly thrown into your hands the 
 final interests of another, — a fellow-creature shuddering 
 between the gates of life and death : this, to a man of 
 apprehensive conscience, would mingle the misery of an 
 atrocious criminality with the misery of a bloody calamity. 
 You are called upon, by the case supposed, possibly to 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 89 
 
 die, but to die at the very moment when, by any even 
 partial failure or effeminate collapse of your energies, you 
 will be self- denounced as a murderer. You had but the 
 twinkling of an eye for your effort, and that effort might have 
 been unavailing ; but to have risen to the level of such an 
 effort would have rescued you, though not from dying, 
 yet from dying as a traitor to your final and farewell duty. 
 26. The situation here contemplated exposes a dread- 
 ful ulcer, lurking far down in the depths of human 
 nature. It is not that men generally are summoned to 
 face such awful trials. But potentially, and in shadowy 
 outline, such a trial is moving subterraneously in perhaps 
 all men's natures. Upon the secret mirror of our dreams 
 such a trial is darkly projected, perhaps, to every one of 
 us. That dream, so familiar to childhood, of meeting a 
 lion, and, through languishing prostration in hope and 
 the energies of hope, that constant sequel of lying down 
 before the Hon pubUshes the secret frailty of human nature 
 — reveals its deep-seated falsehood to itself — records its 
 abysmal treachery. Perhaps not one of us escapes that 
 dream ; perhaps, as by some sorrowful doom of man, that 
 dream repeats for every one of us, through every gen- 
 eration, the original temptation in Eden. Every one of 
 us, in this dream, has a bait offered to the infirm places 
 of his own individual will ;. once again a snare is presented 
 for tempting him into captivity to a luxury of ruin ; once 
 again, as in aboriginal Paradise, the man falls by his own 
 choice; again, by infinite iteration, the ancient earth 
 groans to Heaven, through her secret caves, over the 
 weakness of her child. " Nature, from her seat,° sighing 
 through all her works, " again " gives signs of woe that all 
 
90 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 is lost " ; and again the counter-sigh is repeated to the 
 sorrowing heavens for the endless rebellion against God. 
 It is not without probability that in the world of dreams 
 every one of us ratifies for himself the original transgression. 
 In dreams, perhaps under some secret conflict of the mid- 
 night sleeper, lighted up to the consciousness at the time, 
 but darkened to the memory as soon as all is finished, 
 each several child of our mysterious race completes for 
 himself the treason of the aboriginal fall. 
 
 27. The incident, so memorable in itself by its features 
 of horror, and so scenical by its grouping for the eye, 
 which furnished the text for this reverie upon Sudden Death 
 occurred to myself in the dead of night, as a solitary spec- 
 tator, when seated on the box of the Manchester and 
 Glasgow mail, in the second or third summer after 
 Waterloo. I find it necessary to relate the circumstances, 
 because they are such as could not have occurred unless 
 under a singular combination of accidents. In those 
 days, the oblique and lateral communications with many 
 rural post-offices were so arranged, either through 
 necessity or through defect of system, as to make it 
 requisite for the main north- western mail {i.e., down mail°) 
 on reaching Manchester to halt for a number of hours; 
 how many, I do not remember ; six or seven, I think ; 
 but the result was that, in the ordinary course, the mail 
 recommenced its journey northwards about midnight. 
 Wearied with the long detention at a gloomy hotel, I 
 walked out about eleven o'clock at night for the sake of 
 fresh air ; meaning to fall in with the mail and resume my 
 seat at the post-office. The night, however, being yet 
 dark, as the moon had scarcely risen, and the streets 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 91 
 
 being at that hour empty, so as to offer no opportunities 
 for asking the road, I lost my way, and did not reach the 
 post-office until it was considerably past midnight ; but, 
 to my great relief (as it was important for me to be in 
 Westmoreland by the morning), I saw in the huge 
 saucer eyes of the mail, blazing through the gloom, an 
 evidence that my chance was not yet lost. Past the time 
 it was j but, by some rare accident, the mail was not even 
 yet ready to start. I ascended to my seat on the box, 
 where my cloak was still lying as it had lain at the Bridge- 
 water Arms. I had left it there in imitation of a nautical 
 discoverer, who leaves a bit of bunting on the shore of 
 his discovery, by way of warning off the ground the whole 
 human race, and notifying to the Christian and the 
 heathen worlds, with his best compliments, that he has 
 hoisted his pocket-handkerchief once and for ever upon that 
 virgin soil : thenceforward claiming theyV/j" dominii° to the 
 top of the atmosphere above it, and also the right of driving 
 shafts to the centre of the earth below it ; so that all 
 people found after this warning either aloft in upper cham- 
 bers of the atmosphere, or groping in subterraneous shafts, 
 or squatting audaciously on the surface of the soil, will be 
 treated as trespassers — kicked, that is to say, or decapi- 
 tated, as circumstances may suggest, by their very faithful 
 servant, the owner of the said pocket-handkerchief. In 
 the present case, it is probable that my cloak might not 
 have been respected, and the jus gentium ° might have 
 been cruelly violated in my person — for, in the dark, 
 people commit deeds of darkness, gas being a great ally 
 of morality ; but it so happened that on this night there 
 was no other outside passenger ; and thus the crime, which 
 
92 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 else was but too probable, missed fire for want of a 
 criminal. 
 
 28. Having mounted the box, I took a small quantity 
 of laudanum, having already travelled two hundred and 
 fifty miles — viz., from a point seventy miles beyond 
 London. In the taking of laudanum there was nothing 
 extraordinary. But by accident it drew upon me the 
 special attention of my assessor ° on the box, the coach- 
 man. And in that also there was nothing extraordinary. 
 But by accident, and with great delight, it drew my own 
 attention to the fact that this coachman was a monster 
 in point of bulk, and. that he had but one eye. In fact, 
 he had been foretold by Virgil as 
 
 " Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum." 
 
 He answered to the conditions in every one of the items : 
 — I, a monster he was; 2, dreadful; 3, shapeless; 
 4, huge ; 5, who had lost an eye. But why should that 
 delight me? Had he been one of the Calendars ° in the 
 " Arabian Nights," and had paid down his eye as the 
 price of his criminal curiosity, what right had / to exult 
 in his misfortune? I did not exult; I dehghted in no 
 man's punishment, though it were even merited. But 
 these personal distinctions (Nos. i, 2, 3, 4, 5) identified 
 in an instant an old friend of mine whom I had known 
 in the south for some years as the most masterly of mail- 
 coachmen. He was the man in all Europe that could 
 (if any could) have driven six-in-hand full gallop over Al 
 Sirat ° — that dreadful bridge of Mahomet, with no side 
 battlements, and of extra room not enough for a razor's 
 edge — leading right across the bottomless gulf. Under 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 93 
 
 this eminent man, whom in Greek I cognominated Cyclops 
 Diphrelates (Cyclops the Charioteer), I, and others known 
 to me, studied the diphrelatic art. Excuse, reader, a 
 word too elegant to be pedantic. As a pupil, though I 
 paid extra fees, it is to be lamented that I did not stand 
 high in his esteem. It showed his dogged honesty 
 (though, observe, not his discernment) that he could not 
 see my merits. Let us excuse his absurdity in this par- 
 ticular by remembering his want of an eye. Doubtless 
 that made him blind to my merits. In the art of con- 
 versation, however, he admitted that I had the whip-hand 
 of him. On the present occasion great joy was at our 
 meeting. But what was Cyclops doing here ? Had the 
 medical men recommended northern air, or how? I 
 collected, from such explanations as he volunteered, 
 that he had an interest at stake in some suit-at-law now 
 pending at Lancaster ; so that probably he had got him- 
 self transferred to this station for the purpose of con- 
 necting with his professional pursuits an instant readiness 
 for the calls of his lawsuit. 
 
 29. Meantime, what are we stopping for? Surely we 
 have now waited long enough. Oh, this procrastinating 
 mail, and this procrastinating post-office. Can't they 
 take a lesson upon that subject from me ? Some people 
 have called me procrastinating. Yet you are witness, 
 reader, that I was here kept waiting for the post-office. 
 Will the post-office lay its hand on its heart, in its mo- 
 ments of sobriety, and assert that ever it waited for me ? 
 What are they about? The guard tells me that there is 
 a large extra accumulation of foreign mails this night, 
 owing to irregularities caused by war, by wind, by 
 
94 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 weather, in the packet service, which as yet does not 
 benefit at all by steam. For an extra hour, it seems, the 
 post-office has been engaged in threshing out the pure 
 wheaten correspondence of Glasgow, and winnowing it 
 from the chaff of all baser intermediate towns. But at 
 last all is finished. Sound your horn, guard ! Manches- 
 ter, good-bye ! we've lost an hour by your criminal con- 
 duct at the post-office : which, however, though I do not 
 mean to part with a serviceable ground of complaint, and 
 one which really is such for the horses, to me secretly is 
 an advantage, since it compels us to look sharply for this 
 lost hour amongst the next eight or nine, and to recover 
 it (if we can) at the rate of one mile extra per hour. 
 Off we are at last, and at eleven miles an hour ; and for 
 the moment I detect no changes in the energy or in the 
 skill of Cyclops. 
 
 30. From Manchester to Kendal, which virtually 
 (though not in law) is the capital of Westmoreland, there 
 were at this time seven stages of eleven miles each. The 
 first five of these, counting from Manchester, terminate 
 in Lancaster; which is therefore fifty-five miles north of 
 Manchester, and the same distance exactly from Liver- 
 pool. The first three stages terminate in Preston (called, 
 by way of distinction from other towns of that name, 
 Pi'oud Preston) ; at which place it is that the separate 
 roads from Liverpool and from Manchester to the north 
 become confluent.^ Within these first three stages lay 
 the foundation, the progress, and termination of our 
 
 '^"Confluent": — Suppose a capital Y (the Pythagorean letter): 
 Lancaster is at the foot of this letter; Liverpool at the top of the 
 right branch; Manchester at the top of the left; Proud Preston at 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 95 
 
 night's adventure. During the first stage, I found out 
 that Cyclops was mortal : he was liable to the shocking 
 affection of sleep — a thing which previously I had never 
 suspected. If a man indulges in the vicious habit of 
 sleeping, all the skill in aurigation ° of Apollo himself, 
 with the horses of Aurora to execute his notions, avails 
 him nothing. " Oh, Cyclops ! " I exclaimed, " thou art 
 mortal. My friend, thou snorest." Through the first 
 eleven miles, however, this infirmity — which I grieve to 
 say that he shared with the whole Pagan Pantheon — be- 
 trayed itself only by brief snatches. On waking up, he 
 made an apology for himself which, instead of mending 
 matters, laid open a gloomy vista of coming disasters. 
 The summer assizes, he reminded me, were now going 
 on at Lancaster : in consequence of which for three 
 nights and three days he had not lain down on a bed. 
 During the day he was waiting for his own summons as 
 a witness on the trial in which he was interested, or else, 
 lest he should be missing at the critical moment, was 
 drinking with the other witnesses under the pastoral sur- 
 veillance of the attorneys. During the night, or that 
 part of it which at sea would form the middle watch, he 
 was driving. This explanation certainly accounted for 
 his drowsiness, but in a way which made it much more 
 alarming ; since now, after several days' resistance to this 
 infirmity, at length he was steadily giving way. Through- 
 out the second stage he grew more and more drowsy. 
 
 the centre, where the two branches unite. It is thirty-three miles 
 along either of the two branches; it is twenty-two miles along the 
 stem, — viz., from Preston in the middle to Lancaster at the root. 
 There's a lesson in geography for the reader ! 
 
96 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 In the second mile of the third stage he surrendered 
 himself finally and without a struggle to his perilous 
 temptation. All his past resistance had but deepened 
 the weight of this final oppression. Seven atmospheres ° 
 of sleep rested upon him ; and, to consummate the case, 
 our worthy guard, after singing " Love amongst the 
 Roses " for perhaps thirty times, without invitation and 
 without applause, had in revenge moodily resigned him- 
 self to slumber — not so deep, doubtless, as the coach- 
 man's, but deep enough for mischief. And thus at last, 
 about ten miles from Preston, it came about that I found 
 myself left in charge of his Majesty's London and Glas- 
 gow mail, then running at the least twelve miles an hour. 
 31. What made this neghgence less criminal than else 
 it must have been thought was the condition of the roads 
 at night during the assizes. At that time, all the law 
 business of populous Liverpool, and also of populous 
 Manchester, with its vast cincture of populous rural dis- 
 tricts, was called up by ancient usage to the tribunal of 
 Lilliputian Lancaster. To break up this old traditional 
 usage required, i, a conflict with powerful established 
 interests, 2, a large system of new arrangements, and 3, a 
 new parliamentary statute. But as yet this change was 
 merely in contemplation. As things were at present, 
 twice in the year ^ so vast a body of business rolled north- 
 wards from the southern quarter of the county that for a 
 fortnight at least it occupied the severe exertions of two 
 judges in its despatch. The consequence of this was 
 
 1 ''Twice in the year" : — There were at that time only two assises 
 even in the most populous counties — viz., the Lent Assizes and the 
 Summer Assizes. 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 97 
 
 that every horse available for such a service, along the 
 whole line of road, was exhausted in carrying down the 
 multitudes of people who were parties to the different 
 suits. By sunset, therefore, it usually happened that, 
 through utter exhaustion amongst men and horses, the 
 road sank into profound silence. Except the exhaustion 
 in the vast adjacent county of York from a contested 
 election, no such silence succeeding to no such fiery 
 uproar was ever witnessed in England. 
 
 32. On this occasion the usual silence and solitude 
 prevailed along the road. Not a hoof nor a wheel was 
 to be heard. And, to strengthen this false luxurious 
 confidence in the noiseless roads, it happened also that 
 the night was one of peculiar solemnity and peace. For 
 my own part, though slightly alive to the possibilities of 
 peril, I had so far yielded to the influence of the mighty 
 calm as to sink into a profound reverie. The month 
 was August ; in the middle of which lay my own birth- 
 day — a festival to every thoughtful man suggesting 
 solemn and often sigh-born ^ thoughts. The county was 
 my own native county — upon which, in its southern 
 section, more than upon any equal area known to man 
 past or present, had descended the original curse of 
 labour in its heaviest form, not mastering the bodies only 
 of men, as of slaves, or criminals in mines, but working 
 through the fiery will. Upon no equal space of earth 
 was, or ever had been, the same energy of human power 
 put forth daily. At this particular season also of the 
 
 '^"Sigh-born" : — I owe the Fuggestion of this word to an obscure 
 remembrance of a beautiful phrase in " Giraldus Cambrensis " — viz., 
 suspir loses cogitationes. 
 
98 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 assizes, that dreadful hurricane of flight and pursuit, as it 
 might have seemed to a stranger, which swept to and 
 from Lancaster all day long, hunting the county up and 
 down, and regularly subsiding back into silence about 
 sunset, could not fail (when united with this permanent 
 distinction of Lancashire as the very metropolis and 
 citadel of labour) to point the thoughts pathetically upon 
 that counter-vision of rest, of saintly repose from strife 
 and sorrow, towards which, as to their secret haven, the 
 profounder aspirations of man's heart are in solitude 
 continually travelling. Obliquely upon our left we were 
 nearing the sea; which also must, under the present 
 circumstances, be repeating the general state of halcyon 
 repose. The sea, the atmosphere, the light, bore each 
 an orchestral part in this universal lull. Moonlight and 
 the first timid tremblings of the dawn were by this time 
 blending ; and the blendings were brought into a still more 
 exquisite state of unity by a slight silvery mist, motion- 
 less and dreamy, that covered the woods and fields, but 
 with a veil of equable transparency. Except the feet of 
 our own horses, — which, running on a sandy margin of the 
 road, made but Httle disturbance, — there was no sound 
 abroad. In the clouds and on the earth prevailed the 
 same majestic peace ; and, in spite of all that the villain 
 of a schoolmaster has done for the ruin of our sublimer 
 thoughts, which are the thoughts of our infancy, we still 
 believe in no such nonsense as a Hmited atmosphere. 
 Whatever we may swear with our false feigning lips, in 
 our faithful hearts we still believe, and must for ever 
 believe, in fields of air traversing the total gulf between 
 earth and the central heavens. Still, in the confidence 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 99 
 
 of children that tread without fear every chamber in their 
 father's house, and to whom no door is closed, we, in 
 that Sabbatic vision which sometimes is revealed for an 
 hour upon nights like this, ascend with easy steps from 
 sorrow-stricken fields of earth upwards to the sandals of 
 God. 
 
 33. Suddenly, from thoughts like these I was awakened 
 to a sullen sound, as of some motion on the distant 
 road. It stole upon the air for a moment ; I listened in 
 awe ; but then it died away. Once roused, however, I 
 could not but observe with alarm the quickened motion 
 of our horses. Ten years' experience had made my eye 
 learned in the valuing of motion ; and I saw that we 
 were now running thirteen miles an hour. I pretend to 
 no presence of mind. On the contrary, my fear is that I 
 am miserably and shamefully deficient in that quahty as 
 regards action. The palsy of doubt and distraction 
 hangs like some guilty weight of dark unfathomed re- 
 membrances upon my energies when the signal is flying 
 for action. But, on the other hand, this accursed gift I 
 have, as regards thought, that in the first step towards the 
 possibiUty of a misfortune I see its total evolution ; in 
 the radix of the series I see too certainly and too instantly 
 its entire expansion ; in the first syllable of the dreadful 
 sentence I read already the last. It was not that I feared 
 for ourselves. Us our bulk and impetus charmed against 
 peril in any collision. And I had ridden through too 
 many hundreds of perils that were frightful to approach, 
 that were matter of laughter to look back upon, the first 
 face of which was horror, the parting face a jest — for 
 any anxiety to rest upon our interests. The mail was 
 
 LOFC. 
 
100 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 not built, I felt assured, nor bespoke, that could betray 
 77te who trusted to its protection. But any carriage that 
 we could meet would be frail and Hght in comparison of 
 ourselves. And I remarked this ominous accident of 
 our situation, — we were on the wrong side of the road. 
 But then, it may be said, the other party, if other there 
 was, might also be on the wrong side ; and two wrongs 
 might make a right. That was not hkely. The same 
 motive which had drawn us to the right-hand side of the 
 road — viz., the luxury of the soft beaten sand as con- 
 trasted with the paved centre — would prove attractive 
 to others. The two adverse carriages would therefore, 
 to a certainty, be travelling on the same side ; and from 
 this side, as not being ours in law, the crossing over to 
 the other would, of course, be looked for from us} Our 
 lamps, still lighted, would give the impression of vigilance 
 on our part. And every creature that met us would rely 
 upon us for quartering."^ All this, and if the separate 
 links of the anticipation had been a thousand times more, 
 I saw, not discursively, or by effort, or by succession, but 
 by one flash of horrid simultaneous intuition. 
 
 34. Under this steady though rapid anticipation of the 
 evil which viight be gathering ahead, ah ! what a sullen 
 mystery of fear, what a sigh of woe, was that which stole 
 
 1 It is true that, according to the law of the case as estabUshed by 
 legal precedents, all carriages were required to give way before royal 
 equipages, and therefore before the mail, as one of them. But this 
 only increased the danger, as being a regulation very imperfectly made 
 known, very unequally enforced, and therefore often embarrassing the 
 movements on both sides. 
 
 ^''Quartering" : — This is the technical word, and, I presume, 
 derived from the French cartayer, to evade a rut or any obstacle. 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH lOI 
 
 upon the air, as again the far-off sound of a wheel was 
 heard ! A whisper it was — a whisper from, perhaps, four 
 miles off — secretly announcing a ruin that, being fore- 
 seen, was not the less inevitable ; that, being known, was 
 not therefore healed. What could be done — who was 
 it that could do it — to check the storm-flight of these 
 maniacal horses? Could I not seize the reins from the 
 grasp of the slumbering coachman? You, reader, think 
 that it would have been in your power to do so. And I 
 quarrel not with your estimate of yourself. But, from 
 the way in which the coachman's hand was viced be- 
 tween his upper and lower thigh, this was impossible. 
 Easy was it? See, then, that bronze equestrian statue. 
 The cruel rider has kept the bit in his horse's mouth for 
 two centuries. Unbridle him for a minute, if you please, 
 and wash his mouth with water. Easy was it ? Unhorse 
 me, then, that imperial rider ; knock me ° those marble 
 feet from those marble stirrups of Charlemagne. 
 
 35. The sounds ahead strengthened, and were now 
 too clearly the sounds of wheels. Who and what could 
 it be ? Was it industry in a taxed cart ? Was it youth- 
 ful gaiety in a gig? Was it sorrow that loitered, or joy 
 that raced? For as yet the snatches of sound were too 
 intermitting, from distance, to decipher the character of 
 the motion. Whoever were the travellers, something 
 must be done to warn them. Upon the other party rests 
 the active responsibility, but upon us — and, woe is me ! 
 that us was reduced to my frail opium-shattered self — 
 rests the responsibility of warning. Yet, how should this 
 be accomplished? Might I not sound the guard's horn? 
 Already, on the first thought, I was making my way over 
 
102 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 the roof of the guard's seat. But this, from the accident 
 which I have mentioned, of the foreign mails being piled 
 upon the roof, was a difficult and even dangerous attempt 
 to one cramped by nearly three hundred miles of outside 
 travelling. And, fortunately, before I had lost much time 
 in the attempt, our frantic horses swept round an angle 
 of the road which opened upon us that final stage where 
 the collision must be accomplished and the catastrophe 
 sealed. All was apparently finished. The court was 
 sitting ; the case was heard ; the judge had finished ; and 
 only the verdict was yet in arrear. 
 
 36. Before us lay an avenue straight as an arrow, six 
 hundred yards, perhaps, in length ; and the umbrageous 
 trees, which rose in a regular line from either side, meet- 
 ing high overhead, gave to it the character of a cathedral 
 aisle. These trees lent a deeper solemnity to the early 
 light ; but there was still light enough to perceive, at the 
 further end of this Gothic aisle, a frail reedy gig, in 
 which were seated a young man, and by his side a young 
 lady. Ah, young sir ! what are you about ? If it is req- 
 uisite that you should whisper your communications to 
 this young lady — though really I see nobody, at an hour 
 and on a road so solitary, likely to overhear you — is it 
 therefore requisite that you should carry your lips forward 
 to hers ? The little carriage is creeping on at one mile 
 an hour ; and the parties within it, being thus tenderly 
 engaged, are naturally bending down their heads. Be- 
 tween them and eternity, to all human calculation, there 
 is but a minute and a half. Oh heavens ! what is it that 
 I shall do ? Speaking or acting, what help can I offer ? 
 Strange it is, and to a mere auditor of the tale might 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 103 
 
 seem laughable, that I should need a suggestion from the 
 " Iliad " to prompt the sole resource that remained. 
 Yet so it was. Suddenly I remembered the shout of 
 Achilles,^ and its effect. But could I pretend to shout 
 like the son of Peleus, aided by Pallas ? No : but then I 
 needed not the shout that should alarm all Asia militant; 
 such a shout would suffice as might carry terror into the 
 hearts of two thoughtless young people and one gig-horse. 
 I shouted — and the young man heard me not. A second 
 time I shouted — and now he heard me, for now he raised 
 his head. 
 
 37, Here, then, all had been done that, by me, could 
 be done ; more on my part was not possible. Mine had 
 been the first step ; the second was for the young man ; 
 the third was for God. If, said I, this stranger is a brave 
 man, and if indeed he loves the young girl at his side — or, 
 loving her not, if he feels the obhgation, pressing upon 
 every man worthy to be called a man, of doing his utmost 
 for a woman confided to his protection — he will at least 
 make some effort to save her. If that fails, he will not 
 perish the more, or by a death more cruel, for having made 
 it ; and he will die as a brave man should, with his face to 
 the danger, and with his arm about the woman that he 
 sought in vain to save. But, if he makes no effort, — 
 shrinking without a struggle from his duty, — he himself 
 will not the less certainly perish for this baseness of pol- 
 troonery. He will die no less : and why not ? Wherefore 
 should we grieve that there is one craven less in the world ? 
 No ; let him perish, without a pitying thought of ours 
 wasted upon him ; and, in that case, all our grief will be 
 reserved for the fate of the helpless girl who now, upon the 
 
104 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 least shadow of failure in hi7n, must by the fiercest of 
 translations — must without time for a prayer — must 
 within seventy seconds — stand before the judgment-seat 
 of God. 
 
 38. But craven he was not : sudden had been the call 
 upon him, and sudden was his answer to the call. He 
 saw, he heard, he comprehended, the ruin that was com- 
 ing down : already its gloomy shadow darkened above 
 him ; and already he was measuring his strength to deal 
 with it. Ah ! what a vulgar thing does courage seem when 
 we see nations buying it and selling it for a shiUing a-day : 
 ah ! what a sublime thing does courage seem when some 
 fearful summons on the great deeps of life carries a man, 
 as if running before a hurricane, up to the giddy crest of 
 some tumultuous crisis from which lie two courses, and a 
 voice says to him audibly, " One way lies hope ; take the 
 other, and mourn for ever ! " How grand a triumph if, 
 even then, amidst the raving of all around him, and the 
 frenzy of the danger, the man is able to confront his situa- 
 tion — is able to retire for a moment into soHtude with God, 
 and to seek his counsel from Him / 
 
 39. For seven seconds, it might be, of his seventy, the 
 stranger settled his countenance steadfastly upon us, as if 
 to search and value every element in the conflict before 
 him. For five seconds more of his seventy he sat immov- 
 ably, like one that mused on some great purpose. For 
 five more, perhaps, he sat with eyes upraised, like one 
 that prayed in sorrow, under some extremity of doubt, for 
 light that should guide him to the better choice. Then 
 suddenly he rose ; stood upright ; and, by a powerful strain 
 upon the reins, raising his horse's fore-feet from the ground, 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 105 
 
 he slewed him round on the pivot of his hind-legs, so as 
 to plant the little equipage in a position nearly at right 
 angles to ours. Thus far his condition was not improved ; 
 except as a first step had been taken towards the possibility 
 of a second. If no more were done, nothing was done ; 
 for the Httle carriage still occupied the very centre of our 
 path, though in an altered direction. Yet even now it 
 may not be too late : fifteen of the seventy seconds may 
 still be unexhausted ; and one almighty bound may avail 
 to clear the ground. Hurry, then, hurry ! for the flying 
 moments — they hurry. Oh, hurry, hurry, my brave young 
 man ! for the cruel hoofs of our horses — they also hurry ! 
 Fast are the flying moments, faster are the hoofs of our 
 horses. But fear not for him, if human energy can suffice ; 
 faithful was he that drove to his terrific duty ; faithful was 
 the horse to his command. One blow, one impulse 
 given with voice and hand, by the stranger, one rush from 
 the horse, one bound as if in the act of rising to a fence, 
 landed the docile creature's fore-feet upon the crown or 
 arching centre of the road. The larger half of the little 
 equipage had then cleared our overtowering shadow: 
 that was evident even to my own agitated sight. But it 
 mattered little that one wreck should float off in safety if 
 upon the wreck that perished were embarked the human 
 freightage. The rear part of the carriage — was that 
 certainly beyond the fine of absolute ruin? What power 
 could answer the question? Glance of eye, thought of 
 man, wing of angel, which of these had speed enough to 
 sweep between the question and the answer, and divide 
 the one from the other? Light does not tread upon the 
 steps of light more indivisibly than did our all-conquering 
 
I06 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 arrival upon the escaping efforts of the gig. That must 
 the young man have felt too plainly. His back was now 
 turned to us ; not by sight could he any longer communicate 
 with the peril ; but, by the dreadful rattle of our harness, 
 too truly had his ear been instructed that all was finished 
 as regarded any effort of his. Already in resignation he 
 had rested from his struggle ; and perhaps in his heart he 
 was whispering, " Father, which art in heaven, do Thou 
 finish above what I on earth have attempted." Faster 
 than ever mill race we ran past them in our inexorable 
 flight. Oh, raving of hurricanes that must have sounded 
 in their young ears at the moment of our transit ! Even 
 in that moment the thunder of collision spoke aloud. 
 Either with the swingle-bar, or with the haunch of our 
 near leader, we had struck the off-wheel of the Httle gig ; 
 which stood rather obliquely, and not quite so far advanced 
 as to be accurately parallel with the near-wheel. The 
 blow, from the fury of our passage, resounded terrifically. 
 I rose in horror, to gaze upon the ruins we might have 
 caused. From my elevated station I looked down, and 
 looked back upon the scene ; which in a moment told 
 its own tale, and wrote all its records on my heart for 
 ever. 
 
 40. Here was the map of the passion that now had 
 finished. The horse was planted immovably, w^ith his 
 fore-feet upon the paved crest of the central road. He 
 of the whole party might be supposed untouched by the 
 passion of death. The little cany carriage — partly, per- 
 haps, from the violent torsion of the wheels in its recent 
 movement, partly from the thundering blow we had given 
 to it — as if it sympathised with human horror, was all 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 107 
 
 alive with tremblings and shiverings. The young man 
 trembled not, nor shivered. He sat like a rock. But 
 his was the steadiness of agitation frozen into rest by 
 horror. As yet he dared not to look round ; for he knew 
 that, if anything remained to do, by him it could no 
 longer be done. And as yet he knew not for certain if 
 their safety were accomphshed. But the lady 
 
 41. But the lady ! Oh, heavens ! will that spectacle 
 
 ever depart from my dreams, as she rose and sank upon 
 her seat, sank and rose, threw up her arms wildly to heaven, 
 clutched at some visionary object in the air, fainting, pray- 
 ing, raving, despairing? Figure to yourself, reader, the 
 elements of the case ; suffer me to recall before your 
 mind the circumstances of that unparalleled situation. 
 From the silence and deep peace of this saintly summer 
 night — from the pathetic blending of this sweet moon- 
 light, dawnlight, dreamlight — from the manly tenderness 
 of this flattering, whispering, murmuring love — suddenly 
 as from the woods and fields — suddenly as from the 
 chambers of the air opening in revelation — suddenly as 
 from the ground yawning at her feet, leaped upon her, 
 with the flashing of cataracts, Death the crowned phan- 
 tom, with all the equipage of his terrors, and the tiger 
 roar of his voice. 
 
 42. The moments were numbered; the strife was 
 finished ; the vision was closed. In the twinkling of an 
 eye, our flying horses had carried us to the termination 
 of the umbrageous aisle ; at the right angles we wheeled 
 into our former direction ; the turn of the road carried 
 the scene out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it into 
 my dreams for ever. 
 
I08 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 Section the Third — Dream- Fugue : 
 founded on the preceding theme of sudden death 
 
 " Whence the sound 
 Of instruments, that made melodious chime, 
 Was heard, of harp and organ; and who moved 
 Their stops and chords was seen; his volant touch 
 Instinct through all proportions, low and high. 
 Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue." 
 
 — Par. Lost, Bk. XI. 
 
 Turn ultuosissim amente 
 
 43. Passion of sudden death ! that once in youth I read 
 and interpreted by the shadows of thy averted signs ^ ! — 
 rapture of panic taking the shape (which amongst tombs 
 in churches I have seen) of woman bursting her sepulchral 
 bonds — of woman's Ionic form° bending forward from 
 the ruins of her grave with arching foot, with eyes upraised, 
 with clasped adoring hands — waiting, watching, trem- 
 bling, praying for the trumpet's call to rise from dust for 
 ever ! Ah, vision too fearful of shuddering humanity on 
 the brink of almighty abysses ! — vision that didst start 
 back, that didst reel away, like a shrivelling scroll from 
 before the wrath of fire racing on the wings of the wind ! 
 Epilepsy so brief of horror, wherefore is it that thou canst 
 not die ? Passing so suddenly into darkness, wherefore 
 is it that still thou sheddest thy sad funeral blights upon 
 the gorgeous mosaics of dreams? Fragment of music 
 too passionate, heard once, and heard no more, what 
 
 '^''Averted signs": — I read the course and changes of the lady's 
 agony in the succession of her involuntary gestures ; but it must be 
 remembered that I read all this from the rear, never once catching the 
 lady's full face, and even her profile imperfectly. 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 109 
 
 aileth thee, that thy deep rolling chords come up at 
 intervals through all the worlds of sleep, and after forty 
 years have lost no element of horror ? 
 
 44. Lo, it is summer — almighty summer ! The ever- 
 lasting gates of life and summer are thrown open wide ; 
 and on the ocean, tranquil and verdant as a savannah 
 the unknown lady from the dreadful vision and I myself 
 are floating — she upon a fairy pinnace, and I upon an 
 English three-decker. Both of us are wooing gales of 
 festal happiness within the domain of our common 
 country, within that ancient watery park, within the path- 
 less chase of ocean, where England takes her pleasure as 
 a huntress through winter and summer, from the rising to 
 the setting sun. Ah, what a wilderness of floral beauty 
 was hidden, or was suddenly revealed, upon the tropic 
 islands through which the pinnace moved ! And upon 
 her deck what a bevy of human flowers : young women 
 how lovely, young men how noble, that were dancing 
 together, and slowly drifting towards us amidst music and 
 incense, amidst blossoms from forests and gorgeous 
 corymbi° from vintages, amidst natural carolling, and the 
 echoes of sweet girlish laughter. Slowly the pinnace 
 nears us, gaily she hails us, and silently she disappears 
 beneath the shadow of our mighty bows. But then, as at 
 some signal from heaven, the music, and the carols, and 
 the sweet echoing of girhsh laughter — aU are hushed. 
 What evil has smitten the pinnace, meeting or overtaking 
 her? Did ruin to our friends couch within our own 
 dreadful shadow? Was our shadow the shadow of death ? 
 
no THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 I looked over the bow for an answer, and, behold ! the 
 pinnace was dismantled ; the revel and the revellers were 
 found no more ; the glory of the vintage was dust ; and 
 the forests with their beauty were left without a 
 witness upon the seas. *' But where," and I turned to 
 our crew — " where are the lovely women that danced 
 beneath the awning of flowers and clustering corymbi? 
 Whither have fled the noble young men that danced with 
 them ? " Answer there was none. But suddenly the 
 man at the mast-head, whose countenance darkened 
 with alarm, cried out, *' Sail on the weather beam ! 
 Down she comes upon us : in seventy seconds she also 
 will founder." 
 
 II 
 
 45. I looked to the weather side, and the summer had 
 departed. The sea was rocking, and shaken with gath- 
 ering wrath. Upon its surface sat mighty mists, which 
 grouped themselves into arches and long cathedral aisles. 
 Down one of these, with the fiery pace of a quarrel ° from 
 a cross-bow, ran a frigate right athwart our course. " Are 
 they mad? " some voice exclaimed from our deck. " Do 
 they woo their ruin? " But in a moment, as she was 
 close upon us, some impulse of a heady current or local 
 vortex gave a wheeling bias to her course, and ofl" she 
 forged without a shock. As she ran past us, high aloft 
 amongst the shrouds stood the lady of the pinnace. The 
 deeps opened ahead in malice to receive her, towering 
 surges of foam ran after her, the billows were fierce to 
 catch her. But far away she was borne into desert spaces 
 of the sea : whilst still by sight I followed her, as she ran 
 before the howling gale, chased by angry sea-birds and 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH m 
 
 by maddening billows ; still I saw her, as at the moment 
 when she ran past us, standing amongst the shrouds, with 
 her white draperies streaming before the wind. There 
 she stood, with hair dishevelled, one hand clutched 
 amongst the tackling — rising, sinking, fluttering, trem- 
 bling, praying ; there for leagues I saw her as she stood, 
 raising at intervals one hand to heaven, amidst the fiery 
 crests of the pursuing waves and the raving of the storm ; 
 until at last, upon a sound from afar of malicious laughter 
 and mockery all was hidden for ever in driving showers ; 
 and afterwards, but when I knew not, nor how. 
 
 Ill 
 
 46. Sweet funeral bells ° from some incalculable dis- 
 tance, wailing over the dead that die before the dawn, 
 awakened me as I slept in a boat moored to some familiar 
 shore. The morning twilight even then was breaking; 
 and, by the dusky revelations which it spread, I saw a 
 girl, adorned with a garland of white roses about her 
 head for some great festival, running along the solitary 
 strand in extremity of haste. Her running was the run- 
 ning of panic; and often she looked back as to some 
 dreadful enemy in the rear. But, when I leaped ashore, 
 and followed on her steps to warn her of a peril in front, 
 alas ! from me she fled as from another peril, and vainly 
 I shouted to her of quicksands that lay ahead. Faster, 
 and faster she ran ; round a promontory of rocks she 
 wheeled out of sight ; in an instant I also wheeled round 
 it, but only to see the treacherous sands gathering above 
 her head. Already her person was buried ; only the fair 
 young head and the diadem of white roses around it were 
 
112 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 still visible to the pitying heavens ; and, last of all, was 
 visible one white marble arm. I saw by the early twi- 
 light this fair young head, as it was sinking down to 
 darkness — saw this marble arm, as it rose above her 
 head and her treacherous grave, tossing, faltering, ris- 
 ing, clutching, as at some false deceiving hand stretched 
 out from the clouds — saw this marble arm uttering her 
 dying hope, and then uttering her dying despair. The 
 head, the diadem, the arm — these all had sunk ; at last 
 over these also the cruel quicksand had closed ; and no 
 memorial of the fair young girl remained on earth, ex- 
 cept my own solitary tears, and the funeral bells from the 
 desert seas, that, rising again more softly, sang a requiem 
 over the grave of the buried child, and over her blighted 
 dawn. 
 
 47. I sat, and wept in secret the tears that men have 
 ever given to the memory of those that died before the 
 dawn, and by the treachery of earth, our mother. But 
 suddenly the tears and funeral bells were hushed by a 
 shout as of many nations, and by a roar as from some 
 great king's artillery, advancing rapidly along the valleys, 
 and heard afar by echoes from the mountains. " Hush ! " 
 I said, as I bent my ear earthwards to listen — "hush ! — 
 this either is the very anarchy of strife, or else" — and 
 then I hstened more profoundly, and whispered as I 
 raised my head — " or else, oh heavens ! it is victory that 
 is final, victory that swallows up all strife." 
 
 IV 
 
 48. Immediately, in trance, I was carried over land 
 and sea to some distant kingdom, and placed upon a 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 113 
 
 triumphal car, amongst companions crowned with laurel. 
 The darkness of gathering midnight, brooding over all 
 the land, hid from us the mighty crowds that were weav- 
 ing restlessly about ourselves as a centre : we heard them, 
 but saw them not. Tidings had arrived, within an hour, 
 of a grandeur that measured itself against centuries ; too 
 full of pathos they were, too full of joy, to utter them- 
 selves by other language than by tears, by restless an- 
 thems, and Te Deiims reverberated from the choirs and 
 orchestras of earth. These tidings we that sat upon the 
 laurelled car had it for our privilege to pubhsh amongst 
 all nations. And already, by signs audible through the 
 darkness, by snortings, and tramplings, our angry horses, 
 that knew no fear or fleshly weariness, upbraided us with 
 delay. Wherefore was it that we delayed? We waited 
 for a secret word, that should bear witness to the hope 
 of nations as now accomphshed for ever. At midnight 
 the secret word arrived ; which word was — Waterloo and 
 Recovered Christendom ! ° The dreadful word shone by 
 its own light ; before us it went ; high above our leaders' 
 heads it rode, and spread a golden light over the paths 
 which we traversed. Every city, at the presence of the 
 secret word, threw open its gates. The rivers were con- 
 scious as we crossed. All the forests, as we ran along 
 their margins, shivered in homage to the secret word. 
 And the darkness comprehended it. 
 
 49. Two hours after midnight we approached a mighty 
 Minster. Its gates, which rose to the clouds, were closed. 
 But, when the dreadful word that rode before us reached 
 them with its golden light, silently they moved back upon 
 their hinges ; and at a flying gallop our equipage entered 
 
114 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 the grand aisle of the cathedral. Headlong was our pace ; 
 and at every altar, in the little chapels and oratories to 
 the right hand and left of our course, the lamps, dying or 
 sickening, kindled anew in sympathy with the secret word 
 that was flying past. Forty leagues we might have run 
 in the cathedral, and as yet no strength of morning light 
 had reached us, when before us we saw the aerial galleries 
 of organ and choir. Every pinnacle of fretwork, every 
 station of advantage amongst the traceries, was crested 
 by white-robed choristers that sang deliverance ; that wept 
 no more tears, as once their fathers had wept ; but at in- 
 tervals that sang together to the generations, saying, 
 
 " Chant the deliverer's praise in every tongue," 
 and receiving answers from afar, 
 
 " Such as once in heaven and earth were sung." 
 
 And of their chanting was no end ; of our headlong pace 
 was neither pause nor slackening. 
 
 50. Thus as we ran hke torrents — thus as we swept 
 with bridal rapture over the Campo Santo ^ of the cathe- 
 
 1 "Campo Santo " : — It is probable that most of my readers will be 
 acquainted with the history of the Campo Santo (or cemetery) at Pisa, 
 composed of earth brought from Jerusalem from a bed of sanctity as 
 the highest prize which the noble piety of crusaders could ask or im- 
 agine. To readers who are unacquainted with England, or who (being 
 English) are yet unacquainted with the cathedral cities of England, it 
 may be right to mention that the graves within-side the cathedrals often 
 form a fiat pavement over which carriages and horses might run ; and 
 perhaps a boyish remembrance of one particular cathedral, across which 
 I had seen passengers walk and burdens carried, as about two centuries 
 back they were through the middle of St. Paul's in London, may have 
 assisted my dream. 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH I15 
 
 dral graves — suddenly we became aware of a vast 
 necropolis rising upon the far- oif horizon — a city of sep- 
 ulchres, built within the saintly cathedral for the warrior 
 dead that rested from their feuds on earth. Of purple 
 granite was the necropolis ; yet, in the first minute, it lay 
 like a purple stain upon the horizon, so mighty was the 
 distance. In the second minute it trembled through 
 many changes, growing into terraces and towers of won- 
 drous altitude, so mighty was the pace. In the third 
 minute already, with our dreadful gallop, we were entering 
 its suburbs. Vast sarcophagi rose on every side, having 
 towers and turrets that, upon the limits of the central 
 aisle, strode forward with haughty intrusion, that ran back 
 with mighty shadows into answering recesses. Every sar- 
 cophagus showed many bas-reliefs — bas-rehefs of battles 
 and of battle-fields ; battles from forgotten ages, batdes 
 from yesterday ; battle-fields that, long since, nature had 
 healed and reconciled to herself with the sweet oblivion of 
 flowers ; battle-fields that were yet angry and crimson with 
 carnage. Where the terraces ran, there did we run ; where 
 the towers curved, there did tve curve. With the flight of 
 swallows our horses swept round every angle. Like rivers 
 in flood wheeling round headlands, like hurricanes that ride 
 into the secrets of forests, faster than ever Hght unwove the 
 mazes of darkness, our flying equipage carried earthly pas- 
 sions, kindled warrior instincts, amongst the dust that lay 
 around us — dust oftentimes of our noble fathers that had 
 slept in God from Cr^cy to Trafalgar. And now had we 
 reached the last sarcophagus, now were we abreast of 
 the last bas-relief, already had we recovered the arrow- 
 like flight of the inimitable central aisle, when coming up 
 
Il6 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 this aisle to meet us we beheld afar off a female child, 
 that rode in a carriage as frail as flowers. The mists 
 which went before her hid the fawns that drew her, but 
 could not hide the shells and tropic flowers with which she 
 played — but could not hide the lovely smiles by which she 
 uttered her trust in the mighty cathedral, and in the cheru- 
 bim that looked down upon her from the mighty shafts of 
 its pillars. Face to face she was meeting us ; face to face 
 she rode, as if danger there were none. " Oh, baby ! " I 
 exclaimed, "shalt thou be the ransom for Waterloo? Must 
 we, that carry tidings of great joy to every people, be 
 messengers of ruin to thee ! " In horror I rose at the 
 thought ; but then also, in horror at the thought, rose one 
 that was sculptured on a bas-relief — a Dying Trum- 
 peter.° Solemnly from the field of battle he rose to his 
 feet; and, unslinging his stony trumpet, carried it, in 
 his dying anguish, to his stony lips — sounding once, 
 and yet once again ; proclamation that, in thy ears, oh 
 baby! spoke from the battlements of death. Immedi- 
 ately deep shadows fell between us, and aboriginal silence. 
 The choir had ceased to sing. The hoofs of our horses, 
 the dreadful rattle of our harness, the groaning of our 
 wheels, alarmed the graves no more. By horror the bas- 
 relief had been unlocked unto life. By horror we, that 
 were so full of life, we men and our horses with their fiery 
 fore-legs rising in mid air to their everlasting gallop, were 
 frozen to a bas-reUef. Then a third time the trumpet 
 sounded ; the seals were taken off all pulses ; life, and the 
 frenzy of life, tore into their channels again ; again the 
 choir burst forth in sunny grandeur, as from the muflling 
 of storms and darkness; again the thunderings of our 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 117 
 
 horses carried temptation into the graves. One cry burst 
 from our lips, as the clouds, drawing off from the aisle, 
 showed it empty before us. — " Whither has the infant 
 fled? — is the young child caught up to God?" Lo ! afar 
 off, in a vast recess, rose three mighty windows to the 
 clouds ; and on a level with their summits, at height in- 
 superable to man, rose an altar of purest alabaster. On 
 its eastern face was trembling a crimson glory. A glory 
 was it from the reddening dawn that now streamed 
 through the windows ? Was it from the crimson robes of 
 the martyrs painted on the windows? Was it from the 
 bloody bas-reliefs of earth ? There, suddenly, within that 
 crimson radiance, rose the apparition of a woman's head, 
 and then of a woman's figure. The child it was — grown 
 up to woman's height. CHnging to the horns of the altar, 
 voiceless she stood — sinking, rising, raving, despairing ; 
 and behind the volume of incense that, night and day, 
 streamed upwards from the altar, dimly was seen the fiery 
 font, and the shadow of that dreadful being who should 
 have baptized her with the baptism of death. But by her 
 side was kneeling her better angel, that hid his face with 
 wings ; that wept and pleaded for her ; that prayed when 
 she could 7iot; that fought with Heaven by tears for her 
 deliverance ; which also, as he raised his immortal coun- 
 tenance from his wings, I saw, by the glory in his eye, 
 that from Heaven he had won at last. 
 
 V 
 
 51. Then was completed the passion of the mighty 
 fugue. The golden tubes of the organ, which as yet had 
 but muttered at intervals — gleaming amongst clouds 
 
Il8 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 and surges of incense — threw up, as from fountains un- 
 fathomable, columns of heart-shattering music. Choir 
 and anti-choir were filling fast with unknown voices. 
 Thou also, Dying Trumpeter, with thy love that was 
 victorious, and thy anguish that was finishing, didst enter 
 the tumult ; trumpet and echo — farewell love, and fare- 
 well anguish — rang through the dreadful sane tics ° Oh, 
 darkness of the grave ! that from the crimson altar and 
 from the fiery font wert visited and searched by the 
 effulgence in the angel's eye — were these indeed thy 
 children? Pomps of life, that, from the burials of cen- 
 turies, rose again to the voice of perfect joy, did ye in- 
 deed mingle with the festivals of Death? Lo ! as I 
 looked back for seventy leagues through the mighty 
 cathedral, I saw the quick and the dead that sang to- 
 gether to God, together that sang to the generations of 
 man. All the hosts of jubilation, like armies that ride in 
 pursuit, moved with one step. Us, that, with laurelled 
 heads, were passing from the cathedral, they overtook, 
 and, as with a garment, they wrapped us round with 
 thunders greater then our own. As brothers we moved 
 together; to the dawn that advanced, to the stars that 
 fled ; rendering thanks to God in the highest — that, 
 having hid His face through one generation behind thick 
 clouds of War, once again was ascending, from the 
 Campo Santo of Waterloo was ascending, in the visions of 
 Peace : rendering thanks for thee, young girl ! whom 
 having overshadowed with His ineffable passion of death, 
 suddenly did God relent, suffered thy angel to turn aside 
 His arm, and even in thee, sister unknown ! shown to me 
 for a moment only to be hidden for ever, found an occa- 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 119 
 
 sion to glorify His goodness. A thousand times, amongst 
 the phantoms of sleep, have I seen thee entering the 
 gates of the golden dawn, with the secret word riding 
 before thee, with the armies of the grave behind thee, — 
 seen thee sinking, rising, raving, despairing ; a thousand 
 .times in the worlds of sleep have I seen thee followed 
 by God's angel through storms, through desert seas, 
 through the darkness of quicksands, through dreams and 
 the dreadful revelations that are in dreams ; only that at 
 the last, with one sling of His victorious arm,° He might 
 snatch thee back from ruin, and might emblazon in thy 
 deliverance the endless resurrections of His love I 
 
NOTES 
 
 JOAN OF ARC 
 
 This essay was originally published in the March and August num- 
 bers of Taifs Edinburgh Magazine in 1849, at a time when De Quincey 
 was contributing regularly to Taifs. During this same year he con- 
 tributed Notes on Walter Savage Landor, Schlosser's Literary History 
 of the Eighteenth Century, Milton versus Southey and Landor, Ortho- 
 graphic Mutineers, The Spanish Military Nun, and Protestantism. 
 
 In preparing the Collective Edition of his writings De Quincey made 
 many alterations in this essay, which appeared in the third volume 
 published in 1854. The present text is that of the Collective Edition. 
 
 Joan of Arc. When Joan of Arc left the solitude of Domremy for a 
 " station in the van of armies," France was on the verge of extinction 
 as a nation. For a hundred years the miserable nation had been in the 
 throes of war. England had been fighting for the right to govern France, 
 and France had been fighting for her existence. In the decisive battles 
 of Crecy, Poictiers, and Agincourt, France had lost her courage, had 
 poured out her best blood, and had exhausted her resources, England 
 had become undisputed master of Normandy, and internal strife had 
 driven Burgundy to support England's claims. Henry V. of England 
 had entered Paris and had been recognized as sovereign of France by 
 the States-General of the realm. Such was the condition, when, upon 
 the death of Charles VI. of France, the Dauphin was declared king by 
 the national party. He found his authority restricted to the territory 
 south of the Loire ; and the city of Orleans, the last stronghold of 
 France, besieged by the allied forces of England and Burgundy, was 
 preparing to surrender. Weak and disheartened, the reckless Dauphin 
 was upon the point of leaving the country when Joan of Arc presented 
 herself and told him that she had come to conduct him to Rheims to be 
 crowned. 
 
 1 The notes are grouped under numbers corresponding to the numbers of the 
 paragraphs in the text. 
 
 120 
 
JOAN OF ARC 121 
 
 Joan of Arc, or Jeanne d'Arc, was born in or near the year 1411, iil 
 Domremy, a town which lay partly in Lorraine and partly in Cham- 
 pagne, Her father was a proprietary peasant of the town, with a mind 
 turned to the material things of life; and Joan grew up without educa- 
 tion except in the prayers and creed of the church, which were taught 
 her by her mother. She could sew and spin, but could not read or write. 
 Joan was of a serious, imaginative disposition, devout and dutiful. She 
 spent much time in prayer and in meditation over the distresses of her 
 unhappy country. At the age of thirteen she heard what seemed to her 
 Heavenly Voices, and these continued to invoke her to devote herself 
 to her country's aid. She decided that it was her duty to relieve Orleans 
 and to conduct Charles to Rheims to be crowned. Accordingly, this 
 simple unlettered peasant girl presented herself at the gay court of the 
 pusillanimous Dauphin and proffered her assistance. After much hesi- 
 tancy on the part of Charles and his advisers, she was put in command 
 of about five thousand men, and sent to the relief of beleaguered Orleans, 
 She entered the city at the head of her troops on April 29, 1429, As a 
 result of her success the French placed confidence in her, believing in 
 the genuineness of her inspiration. The English, on the contrary, attrib- 
 uted her success to the assistance of the devil. Disheartened at the 
 prospect of having to cope with the powers of evil, on May 8, they raised 
 the siege and departed, only to be pursued by the enthusiastic French, 
 who defeated them in the decisive battle of Patay and compelled them 
 to retire beyond the Loire. 
 
 On July 17, Charles was crowned at Rheims, and Joan, believing that 
 her mission was accomplished, wished to retire to her native Domremy 
 and resume the old life with her parents. The French, however, would 
 not willingly let go one whom they hoped might be instrumental in utterly 
 crushing their old enemy and expelling her from the land. They pre- 
 vailed upon the Maid to remain, although she avowed that in carrying 
 out their wishes she was no longer led by the Heavenly Voices. She 
 was no less devoted to the cause, but felt that her course was leading 
 her to her doom. As a consequence, the old enthusiasm which she had 
 inspired in the troops was gone. She was wounded in an attack on 
 Paris in September, and in May of the following year was captured by 
 the i^urgundians, who were adherents of the English. The Bishop of 
 Beauvais, either through ambition or sheer malignity, and the University 
 of Paris connived at her destruction, and the result was that Joan was 
 sold to the English. She was turned over by them to the Inquisition to 
 be tried as a heretic and a witch. Her judges, all but one of whom 
 
122 NOTES 
 
 mere French churchmen, deemed her guilty and condemned her to be 
 burned. She was pardoned ; but her keepers conspired to induce her 
 to assume again her male attire, which led to a second condemnation, 
 and as a result she was burned alive in the market place of Rouen 
 May 30, 1431. 
 
 (i) Like the Hebrew shepherd boy. David left his flocks in the 
 care of a keeper and went to carry provisions to his brothers who were 
 in the army with Saul. He found the army in dismay because of the 
 challenge of the Philistine giant, Goliath. He decided to meet the 
 dreaded enemy himself, and after some hesitancy Saul permitted him to 
 go. For the full account see i Samuel xvii. 
 
 In what does the parallel between the girl of Domrhny a?id the boy of 
 Bethlehem consist? 
 
 Observe instances of De Quincey's use of Biblical language. What is 
 the effect produced by it ? 
 
 Vaucouleurs. A town near Domremy. 
 
 Apparitors. The summoning officers attendant upon ecclesiastical 
 courts. 
 
 En contumace. A legal term meaning " in contempt of court," 
 applied to one who fails to appear when summoned. 
 
 As even yet may happen. Joan of Arc has almost universally been 
 accepted as the historical heroine of France. Her sentence of condem- 
 nation as a sorceress was revoked by a decree of the Pope only twenty- 
 five years after her death. During the centuries that have elapsed since, 
 Joan's hold upon the popular mind in France has grown slowly but 
 steadily. De Quincey is induced to write in her defence rather because 
 he desires to attack Michelet than because the Maid needs to be de- 
 fended. 
 
 (2) Great was the throne of France. It was, doubtless, the most 
 splendid court in Christendom. 
 
 The lilies of France. A reference to the fieurs-de-lis, the national 
 emblem under the monarchy. 
 
 Combined to wither them. When the French monarchy was over- 
 thrown by the Revolution of 1789, the fleurs-de-lis were supplanted by 
 the tricolor. 
 
 What is the dominant feeling that De Quincey creates for his heroine ? 
 By what means, largely f 
 
 What effect has his choice of stately words a?id phrases ? 
 
 (3) M. Michelet. Jules Michelet (1798-1874) was a French historian 
 and controversialist. He was made professor of history in the College 
 
JOAN OF ARC 123 
 
 de France in 1838. His principal historical writings are the History of 
 France, History of the French Revolution, and Women of the Revolution. 
 These works are noted for vivacity and brilliancy. His controversial 
 works are marked by eloquence, sarcasm, sentiment, and strong bias. 
 It is not strange that a contentious writer of this character should 
 arouse the feelings of a polemic contemporary like De Quincey. 
 
 Revolutionary cast. The French writers of this period represent a 
 literary movement corresponding in many ways to the Romantic Revival 
 in England. Though De Quincey was largely in accord with the poetic 
 side of that movement, as a Tory he could not view leniently its political 
 doctrines. He railed at Whigs, Republicans, Radicals, Revolutionists, 
 and " the faction of Jacobinism through its entire gamut." 
 
 Recovered liberty. In the Revolution of 1830 the Bourbon monarchs 
 were expelled and France again became a republic. 
 
 The book against priests. Upon assuming his duties as professor 
 of history in the College de France in 1848, Michelet began a series of 
 controversial lectures attacking the Jesuits. These lectures were subse- 
 quently published in three volumes. The first one was The Jesuites ; 
 the second, the one referred to by De Quincey, Priests, Women, and the 
 Families; and the third, The People. 
 
 Chevy Chase. One of the most famous old English ballads of the 
 seventeenth century. There are two versions of the poem. The hnes 
 here parodied run as follows : — 
 
 " The stout erle of Northumberland 
 A vow to God did make 
 His pleasure in the Scottish woods 
 Three sommers days to take." 
 
 Draperies of asbestos were cleansed. It is said that Charlemagne 
 had a table-cloth of asbestos, which, to the astonishment of his guests, 
 he threw into the fire after the meal was over. 
 
 Explain De Quincey' s attitude toward M. Michelet. How severe is 
 his criticism ? What elements of humor do you find? What spirit moves 
 De Quincey in this essay ? 
 
 (4) La Pucelle. This is the French word for " maid " or " virgin." 
 After the relief of Orleans, Joan of Arc was called La Pucelle d'Orleans, 
 a designation which became permanent. 
 
 All the documents. This suggests something of De Quincey's 
 method. It is quite usual for him to lay out all the details, even to the 
 slightest minutiae, essential to the understanding of his case, before he 
 presents the case itself. 
 
124 NOTES 
 
 The collection. This work is Quicherat's Proces de Condamnatlon et 
 Rehabilitation de Jeanne d'Arc, five volumes. The first volume appeared 
 in 1841 and the last in 1849. 
 
 Hannibal. The famous Carthaginian general. When he was only 
 nine years old his father, Hamilcar, made him swear eternal enmity to 
 Rome. He won the admiration of Rome by his daring enterprise in 
 leading a vast army across the Alps in 217 B.C. He hved in a continual 
 state of war with the great empire. In the end he took poison to avoid 
 being carried away captive to Rome. 
 
 Mithridates. A warlike king of Pontus, who was hostile to Roman 
 sovereignty in the East. To avoid falling into the hands of the Romans, 
 having failed in an attempt at suicide by poison, he ordered a soldier to 
 run him through with the sword. The honor accorded him was the royal 
 funeral which the victorious Pompey ordered for him. 
 
 Delenda est Anglia Victrix. " Victorious England must be de- 
 stroyed." This is modelled after the words with which the elder Cato 
 used to end his speeches of whatsoever nature, — Delenda est Carthago. 
 It reveals De Quincey's idea of the attitude of the French toward England. 
 
 Hyder Ali. A powerful prince of India. He was sultan of the state 
 of Mysore, and a bloodthirsty rival of the English in India. His son 
 met his fate in the battle of Seringapatam in 1799. 
 
 Suffren. This French admiral came off victor in two engagements 
 with the English. In 1780 he captured twelve merchant ships, and in 
 the following year he won a victory over Commodore Johnstone. 
 
 State in a single sentence the idea that De Quincey advances in this 
 paragraph. What does he reveal of himself here? What confiection has 
 this paragraph with his general purpose ? 
 
 (5) Champenoise. The feminine form of Cha7npenois, an inhabit- 
 ant of Champagne. 
 
 What evidence of De Quincey's playful ?}tanner do you find in this 
 paragraph f 
 
 (6) The cis and the trans. Latin prefixes signifying " on this side," 
 and " on that side," or " hither " and " farther." 
 
 Decussated. This word was used by De Quincey, doubtless from 
 the fact that a St. Andrew's cross is called in Latin crux decussata. 
 
 Odious man's. For an explanation of De Quincey's attitude toward 
 Joan's father, see paragraph 15. 
 
 What is the relation of the discussion in this paragraph and the two 
 that follow to the author' s general subject? What light does it throw on 
 Joan's life? 
 
JOAN OF ARC 125 
 
 (7) Crecy. This battle was fought in 1346. The flower of the 
 French army, including twelve hundred knights and about thirty- 
 thousand footmen, were cut down. Among the slain Lorrainers were 
 Rudolf of Lorraine and the Count of Bar. 
 
 Agincourt. The English under Henry V. won a decisive victory 
 over the French, killing ten thousand men. Frederick of Lorraine was 
 among the slain nobles. 
 
 Nicopolis. In 1396 the sultan Bajazet defeated with great slaughter 
 the allied forces of France, Poland, and Hungary, The Lorrainers 
 again shared the fate of the defeated arms. 
 
 (8) Explain the value of De Quincey's exposition in this paragraph. 
 What is the feeling created by him ? What elements of descriptive power 
 
 are shown here ? 
 
 (9) Poictiers. In this battle Edward, the Black Prince, with only 
 eight thousand men, captured the French king, defeating his army of 
 nearly fifty thousand men. 
 
 Withering overthrows. In these battles it was proved that the 
 knight was not a match for the English footsoldiers with their bows 
 and arrows, " From the day of Cressy feudalism tottered slowly but 
 surely to its grave." — Green. 
 
 The madness of the poor king. Charles VI. came to the throne in 
 1380. He became insane in 1392 as a result, it is believed, of the 
 experience here related by De Quincey. His uncles became engaged 
 in a struggle over the conduct of the government, and brought on 
 civil war. Henry V. of England seized this opportunity to invade 
 France, and, after the battle of Agincourt, obtained a treaty by which 
 he was to become king of France on the death of Charles VI. 
 
 The famines, the extraordinary diseases, etc. Famines visited 
 both France and England during the first half of the fourteenth century. 
 Three times, also, during the century was Europe, or parts of it, visited 
 by the terrible disease known as Black Death. Its first appearance in 
 the south of France was in 1347, when it carried off half of the inhabit- 
 ants. There was an insurrection of the peasantry in France in 1358, 
 
 < known as the Insurrection of the Jacquerie, and one in England in 1381, 
 
 ' known as Wat Tyler's Rebellion. 
 
 Termination of the Crusades. The date of the last Crusade is 1270. 
 The real effects of the Crusades were the breaking up of feudalism, the 
 freeing of the serfs, and the growth of nationaUty. 
 
 Destruction of the Templars. Because of its corruption, the Order 
 of the Temple was broken up by a decree of the Pope in 1312. Some 
 of the leaders suffered death at the stake. 
 
 V 
 
126 NOTES 
 
 Papal interdicts. These are decrees of a pope, bishop, or ecclesi- 
 astical council forbidding the rites of the church. In 1200 Innocent III. 
 put all France under an interdict; all ecclesiastical services were 
 suspended. 
 
 The house of Anjou, or the Angevins, were famous for their deeds 
 of violence. They were, moreover, well represented in the reigning 
 families of Europe. 
 
 By the Emperor. The Emperor Conradin tried to overthrow Charles 
 of Anjou, who had usurped the Two Sicilies, but was captured and put 
 to death by the usurper. The Emperor Sigismund, by his treachery, 
 caused the burning of John Huss, and thus brought on the Hussite 
 war. 
 
 Spectacle of a double Pope. For a period of thirty-eight years after 
 1378 there were two popes, one holding court at Avignon, France, the 
 other at Rome. The " abominable " part of this consisted in the 
 curses and foul charges the two hurled at each other. 
 
 Vast rents. De Quincey refers to events which were preparing the 
 way for the religious Reformation in Germany and in England. 
 
 (10) By what means does De Quincey produce the poetic effects of this 
 paragraph ? 
 
 What are the traits of Joan's character suggested here ? 
 
 How does De Quincey adapt his portrayal to the mystery of Joan's 
 character ? 
 
 What information does this paragraph give us of De Quincey — his 
 tastes and abilities ? 
 
 (11) Misereres. Penitential psalms. The Miserere is based upon 
 the Fifty-first Psalm and begins with miserere, Latin for " have mercy." 
 
 Te Deums. Hymns of praise. 
 
 Those mysterious fauns. There are many tales of the Middle Ages 
 which narrate incidents of knights who were led astray to fairyland by 
 mysterious and elusive creatures of this nature. 
 
 That ancient stag. Legends about the white st^g date back to early 
 Greece. Charlemagne is said to have caught one white hart at Magde- 
 burg and another in the woods of Holstein. " This chasing of the white 
 doe or the white hart by the spectral huntsman has assumed various 
 forms. According to Aristotle a white hart was killed by Agathocles, 
 King of Sicily, which a thousand years beforehand had been conse- 
 crated to Diana by Diomedes. Alexander the Great is said by Pliny 
 to have caught a white stag, placed a collar of gold about its neck^ 
 and afterward set it free. Succeeding heroes have in after days been 
 
JOAN OF ARC 127 
 
 announced as the capturers of this famous white hart." — Hardwicke's 
 Traditions. 
 
 What light does the author throw on the visionary character of Joan 
 in this paragraph ? 
 
 What evidence is to be found here that the atithor loved Romance ? 
 
 (13) What is the author's purpose in paragraphs g to ij ? 
 
 (14) Bergereta. Mediaeval Latin for " shepherdess." 
 What change in the atcthor's tone is evident here f 
 
 What instance of assertion is there in the paragraph ? Of argument f 
 Of playfulness? Of probable bias? 
 
 (15) Chevalier, as-tu donne au cochon a manger? "Chevalier, 
 have you fed the hog ?" The other French phrases read : " My daugh- 
 ter, have you fed the hog ? " " Maid of Orleans, have you saved the 
 fleurs-de-lis (France) ? " 
 
 What is the real cause of De Quincey's dislike of D' Arc? 
 
 (16) To what part of Joan's career is the author now passing? 
 
 (17) Detection of the dauphin. Does De Quincey bring evidence of 
 fact to prove his point? What is his real objection to accepting the report ? 
 Is such an incident i?tconsistent with Joan's character ? 
 
 Coup-d'essai. First test. 
 
 Un peu fort. A little too much. 
 
 The English boy. Henry VI., whose mother was Katherine, the 
 oldest daughter of Charles VI. See note (9) on Charles VI. 
 
 The ovens of Rheims. According to tradition all French kings 
 must be crowned at Rheims, De Quincey here playfully mingles this 
 tradition with the fame of the bake ovens of Rheims, noted for their 
 biscuits and cakes. 
 
 A parte ante. By anticipation. The phrase means literally " from 
 the part before." 
 
 Both trials. De Quincey refers to the trial of 1431, at which Joan 
 was condemned, and to that of 1455, at which she was pronounced 
 guiltless. 
 
 What is his purpose? What is the point that De Quincey is making 
 in this paragraph ? What do we learti here abotit the author's qualities 
 of mind? 
 
 (20) Coup-de-main. A sudden movement or attack. 
 
 Why does De Quincey pass so rapidly over the deeds of Joan? 
 
 (21) The inappreciable end. Inappreciable is here used, as invalu- 
 able is often used, to mean too great to be properly appreciated. 
 
 She pricks for sheriffs. The old custom was for the sovereign to 
 
128 NOTES 
 
 select the sheriff of a county by striking, or "pricking," at random with 
 a bodkin one of the names in a Hst of three prepared by the Lord Lieu- 
 tenant. It appears that one out of the three was chosen, not two, as 
 De Quincey states. 
 
 What has the close of this paragraph to do with De Quincey s general 
 purpose ? What is his motive in discussing this subject ? 
 
 (22) Nolebat . . . She was unwilling to use her sword or to kill 
 any one. 
 
 What information about Joan' s character does this paragraph afford? 
 What feeling toward Joan does De Quincey wish to arouse in the reader ? 
 
 (23) Bishop of Beauvais. Pierre Cochon, who was driven from 
 Beauvais as a traitor, went to Paris, where he became rector of the 
 University. He was bought by the English with the promise of a 
 bishopric. 
 
 Triple crown. The papal tiara is encircled by three coronets. 
 
 Judges examining the prisoner against himself. The French 
 judges subject the prisoner to a severe examination before he is brought 
 to trial. 
 
 What evidences of De Quincey' s prejudices appear here? 
 
 (24) What elements of the Maid's character are shown in this para- 
 graph ? 
 
 What information do we get about De Quincey as a writer here f In 
 the next paragraph ? 
 
 (26) Luxor. A temple constituting part of the ruins at Thebes, 
 Egypt. It was one of the most magnificent specimens of ancient 
 architectural creation. 
 
 Marie Antoinette. Queen of Louis XVI., and daughter of Francis 
 I., Emperor of Germany. She may be called daughter of the Caesars 
 because, as German Emperor, her father was head of the Holy Roman 
 Empire, and therefore, a Caesar. Marie Antoinette was executed in 
 
 1793- 
 
 Charlotte Corday. Inspired by a desire to free her country from the 
 Reign of Terror, this girl of noble birth went to Paris and killed Marat, 
 July 15, 1793. She was guillotined two days later. 
 
 What evidence of De Quincey s romantic tastes do you find in this 
 paragraph ? 
 
 What is the author's purpose in this paragraph ? What effect is he 
 trying to produce upon the reader ? 
 
 (27) Grafton. Richard Grafton, who in 1569 published a Chronicle 
 at large and meere History of the Affayres of Englande and the Kinges 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 
 
 129 
 
 of the Same. According to his account Joan M'as " a devilish witch 
 and a fanaticall enchantresse," with a " foule [ugly] face." 
 
 Holinshead. Holinshead's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and 
 Ireland appeared in 1587. The interesting thing about the book is that 
 it furnished much of the material for Shakespeare's English historical 
 plays, 
 
 (28) Is De Quincey in this paragraph and the following arguing for 
 Joan's sake or for the sake of taking Af. Michelet to task? Give 
 reasons for your opinion . 
 
 (29) A priori. A priori reasoning proceeds from principles already 
 known or assumed. 
 
 Is De Quincey s reasoning convincing? Reproduce it. 
 
 Which theory seems more consistent with Joan's life ? 
 
 Explain why this is a fitting close to the controversial part of the essay. 
 
 (31) Explaiti the propriety of this vision. In what sense is it a sum- 
 mary ofJoa7z's life ? In what respects is it an estimate of her character ? 
 
 (32) What spirit actuates the author ifi this final paragraph ? 
 
 By what means does the author turn this paragraph into a characteriza- 
 tion of Joan ? 
 
 Would the close have been as strong if this last paragraph had been 
 omitted? 
 
 THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 
 
 " In October, 1849, there appeared in Blackwood's Magazine an 
 article entitled The Effglish M ail-Coach, or The Glory of Motion. 
 There was no intimation that it was to be continued ; but in December, 
 1849, there followed in the same magazine an article in two sections, 
 headed by a paragraph explaining that it was by the author of the pre- 
 vious article in the October number, and was to be taken in connection 
 with that article. One of the sections of this second article was entitled 
 The Vision of Sudden Death, and the other, Dream-Fugue on the above 
 theme of Sudde?t Death. When De Quincey revised the papers in 
 1854 for republication in Volume IV. of the Collective Edition of his 
 writings, he brought the whole under the one general title of The Eng- 
 lish Mail-Coach, dividing the text, as at present, into three sections or 
 chapters, the first with the sub-title The Glory of Motion, the second with 
 the sub-title The Vision of Sudden Death, and the third with the sub- 
 title Dream-Fugue, founded on the preceding theme of Sudden Death. 
 
130 NOTES 
 
 Great care was bestowed on the revision. Passages that had appeared 
 in the magazine article were omitted; new sentences were inserted ; 
 and the language was retouched throughout." — MasSON. 
 
 (i) Mr. John Palmer. "Mr. John Palmer, a native of Bath, and 
 from about 1768 the energetic proprietor of the Theatre Royal in that 
 city, had been led, by the wretched state in those days of the means of 
 intercommunication between Bath and London, and his own conse- 
 quent difficulties in arranging for a punctual succession of good actors 
 at his theatre, to turn his attention to the improvement of the whole 
 system of Post-Office conveyance, and of locomotive machinery gener- 
 ally, in the British Islands. The result was a scheme for superseding, 
 on the great roads at least, the then existing system of sluggish and 
 irregular stage-coaches, the property of private persons and companies, 
 by a new system of government coaches, in connection with the Post- 
 Office, carrying the mails and also a regulated number of passengers, 
 with clockwork precision, at a rate of comparative speed, which he 
 hoped should ultimately be not less than ten miles an hour. The 
 opposition to the scheme was, of course, enormous ; coach proprietors, 
 innkeepers, the Post-Office officials themselves, were all against Mr. 
 Palmer; he was voted a crazy enthusiast and a public bore. Pitt, how- 
 ever, when the scheme was submitted to him, recognized its feasibility ; 
 on the 8th of August, 1784, the first mail-coach on Mr. Palmer's plan 
 started from London at 8 o'clock in the morning and reached Bristol 
 at II o'clock at night; and from that day the success of the new system 
 was assured. — Mr. Palmer himself, having been appointed Surveyor 
 and Comptroller-General of the Post-Office, took rank as an eminent 
 and wealthy public man, M. P. for Bath and what not, and lived till 
 1818." — Masson. 
 
 He had married the daughter of a duke. " De Quincey makes it 
 one of his [Mr. Palmer's] distinctions that he ' had married the daughter 
 of a duke,' and in a footnote to that paragraph he gives the lady's name 
 as ' Lady Madeline Gordon.' From an old Debrett, however, I learn 
 that Lady Madelina Gordon, second daughter of Alexander, fourth 
 Duke of Gordon, was first married, on the 3d of April, 1789, to Sir 
 Robert Sinclair, Bart., and next, on the 25th of November, 1805, to 
 Charles Palmer, of Lockley Parks, Berks, Esq. If Debrett is right, her 
 second husband was not John Palmer of Mail-Coach celebrity, and De 
 Quincey is wrong." — Masson. 
 
 (2) Vast distances. Vastness and distance appealed strongly to De 
 Quincey's imagination. He made much of these in The Flight of a 
 Tartar Tribe. 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 131 
 
 Apocalyptic vials. The vials of the wrath of God. See Revelation 
 xvi. 
 
 Trafalgar. Off Cape Trafalgar in 1805, Admiral Nelson won a signal 
 victory over the combined fleets of France and Spain. 
 
 Salamanca. Near Salamanca Wellington defeated the French in the 
 summer of 1812. 
 
 Vittoria. Here Wellington again, in 1813, gave a crushing blow to 
 the French forces, driving them back across the Pyrenees. 
 
 What evlde?ices of De Qui?iceys romantic tastes does this paragraph 
 contain f 
 
 What indications that he liked to view things on a grand scale ? 
 
 (3) Most universities, etc. Both Oxford and Cambridge Universi- 
 ties are composed of a large number of separate colleges. Each college 
 has its own faculty, but is subject to the general governing body of the 
 University. 
 
 Michaelmas, Lent, Easter, and Act. " These might be called re- 
 spectively the autumn, winter, spring, and summer terms. Michaelmas, 
 the feast of St. Michael and All Angels, is on September 29. Hilary 
 and Trinity are other names for Lent term and Act term respec- 
 tively. Act term is the last term of the academic year ; its name is that 
 originally given to a disputation for a Master's degree ; such disputa- 
 tions took place at the end of the year generally, and hence gave a 
 name to the summer term. Although the rules concerning residence 
 at Oxford are more stringent than in De Quincey's time, only eighteen 
 weeks' residence is required during the year, six in Michaelmas, six in 
 Lent, and six in Easter and Act." — TURK, 
 
 Going down. That is, going into the country. 
 
 Attaint. Here used in its legal sense. The penalties of treason, 
 unless suspended by an act of ParUament, extend to the descendants of 
 the traitor. 
 
 Pariahs. The pariah is a member of the lower caste of Hindoo 
 society. He is regarded as an outcast by the higher castes. The social 
 outcast early took a strong hold on De Quincey's mind. 
 
 Salle-a-manger. Dining-hall, There are still many "privileged" 
 dining rooms in English inns. 
 
 What are the characteristics of De Quincey's humor as shown in this 
 and following paragraphs ? 
 
 What things here indicate that De Quincey was a good observer ? 
 
 What phases of life seem especially to appeal to him? 
 
 (4) Penumbra. A margin of partial shadow. 
 
132 NOTES 
 
 (6) Great wits jump. "Great wits agree." Cf. Arragon's words in 
 the Merchant of Venice : — 
 
 " I will not jump with common spirits." 
 
 Hammer-cloth. This is a cloth covering the driver's seat or box. 
 Why it is so called is not definitely known. 
 
 Fi Fi. " This paragraph is a caricature of a story told in Staunton's 
 Account of the Earl of Macartney s Embassy to China in iy()2." — TURK. 
 
 Does the humor of this paragraph lie in the story itself or in the man- 
 ner of the narrative ? Just what are the things that jnake the account 
 humorous f 
 
 Which of the following adjectives apply to this humor : natural, deli- 
 cate, playful, grotesque, mischievous, far-fetched, boisterous ? 
 
 (7) Ca ira. A refrain of a popular song of the Revolution in France. 
 Its literal meaning is, " It will go." 
 
 Aristotle's, Zeno's, Cicero's. These men were all ethical teachers. 
 
 (8) Noters and protesters. A noter is a notary. One of his func- 
 tions is to protest notes, checks, and other financial papers, which 
 are not paid when due. 
 
 Astrological shadows. Impending misfortunes, due to the unlucky 
 star under which one may have been born. 
 
 House of life. In astrology the heavens are divided into sections 
 called " houses of life." 
 
 Von Troil's Iceland. This is evidently an error of memory on the 
 part of De Quincey. The chapter referred to is to be found in Horre- 
 bow's Natural History of Iceland, and reads as follows : — 
 "Chapter LXII, Concerning Snakes. 
 
 "There are no snakes to be met with throughout the whole island." 
 
 Laesa majestas. An offence against sovereignty, accounted treason. 
 
 What proof of the author's wide reading does this paragraph contain ? 
 
 What things here may be considered pedantic ? Find other marks of 
 pedantry in previous paragraphs. 
 
 (9) Within benefit of clergy. The privilege of exemption from trial 
 by a civil judge or court was claimed by the clergy, and finally extended 
 to all persons capable of reading and writing. This privilege was 
 entirely abolished in 1827. 
 
 (11) A fortiori. Equivalent to "much more." Literally, it means 
 " from stronger," with ^a«ja (reason) understood. 
 
 Brummagem. This is a vulgar corruption of Birmingham. As Bir- 
 mingham was noted for its manufacture of cheap wares, this corrupt 
 form came to be a synonym for cheap, showy jewellery. 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 133 
 
 Jacobinical. To De Quincey this was a synonym for " revolutionary." 
 
 (12) WAat qualities does De Quincey possess as a story-teller? As a 
 jester? 
 
 Do you find that De Quincey often detracts from the merit of his humor ? 
 If so, by what fault ? 
 
 (13) Magna loquimur. We speak great things. Magna vivimus, 
 we experience great things. 
 
 By culinary process. De Quincey refers to the boiling of the water 
 to make steam. 
 
 What is it that attracts De Quincey to the stage-coach ? 
 
 What qualities of his character are shown in this preference for the 
 stage-coach to the steam car ? 
 
 What are his objections to the car ? 
 
 (15) Say, all our praises. This line in Pope's Moral Essays reads : — 
 
 " But all our praises why should Lords engross ? " 
 What elements of real romance are there in this paragraph f 
 What effect has the humor on the genui?teness of the romantic element? 
 Which is the more natural, the hmnor or the romance ? Give reasons 
 for your answer. 
 
 (16) Cayman. From Spanish caiman, a tropical American alli- 
 gator. 
 
 (17) In what respects is this paragraph like a real dream ? 
 What new side of De Quincey' s mind does this paragraph reveal? 
 What is there playfully humorous about the picture? 
 
 Do you find that it suggests at all the pathetic ? 
 
 (19) Attelage. A French word meaning a "team "or "yoke" of 
 horses or oxen. Here it includes the four horses and the coach to 
 which they were attached. 
 
 What are the chief features of this picture? 
 
 By what means does De Quincey give life to the portrayal ? What is 
 the nature of the vividness ? 
 
 In what does the author exhibit his pride in what is English ? 
 
 Which of his great antipathies is suggested in this and in the preceding 
 paragraph ? 
 
 (20) Bamet is in Hertfordshire, about eleven miles to the north of 
 London. 
 
 Charwomen. Chore women, women who work by the day. 
 What is the dominatit impression that the author produces by this para- 
 graph ? By what details does he produce it ? 
 
 (21) Gazette. In earlier days this word was the name given to the 
 
134 NOTES 
 
 ofificial organs of the government. In De Quincey's time it was applied 
 to any official announcement, or news of governmental importance. 
 
 W/iat is the effect of this picture on the previous exhilaratitig narra- 
 tive ? 
 
 (22) Fey. This is an Anglo-Saxon word. In Scotland the expres- 
 sion " you are surely fey " is applied " to a person observed to be in 
 extravagantly high spirits, or in any mood surprisingly beyond the 
 bounds of his ordinary temperament, — the notion being that the excite- 
 ment is supernatural and a presage of his approaching death or some 
 other calamity about to befall him." — Masson. 
 
 Imperfect one of Talavera. Wellington won a complete victory over 
 the French at this place, in 1809, but was deprived of the fruits of his 
 success through the inexcusable retreat of his Spanish allies under 
 General Cuesta. 
 
 Aceldama. The field of blood, the potter's field outside Jerusalem, 
 bought with the money Judas received for betraying Christ. Hence, it 
 means any place of blood. 
 
 Which is the most vivid of the three pictures given in these paragraphs? 
 Why? 
 
 Which is most happy in its effect up07t the reader f 
 
 Explain why De Quincey arranges them in the order he does. 
 
 How are they a preparation for the following story ? 
 
 What is the central idea of this first part of the essay? 
 
 (23) Consummation . . . fervently to be desired. This is an echo 
 from Hamlet's soliloquy, III. i. 60: — 
 
 " To die, — to sleep, — 
 No more ; and by a sleep to say we end 
 The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks 
 That flesh is heir to, — 'ds a consummation 
 Devoutly to be wished." 
 
 Noblest of Romans. "The character of the 'mightiest Julius' is 
 estimated by De Quincey in the essay on The Ccesars, one is glad to 
 find, as he was by Shakspere, and as he has been by every fit modern 
 authority, as the noblest of Roman men." — Masson, 
 
 What relation has this discussion to the central idea of this part of the 
 essay ? 
 
 What characteristic of De Quincey's style is revealed in this discussion f 
 
 Is the author's reasoning logical? Give reasons for your answer. 
 
 (24) (SiaOavaros. From two Greek words, ^lavos meaning " vio- 
 lent" and davaros meaning " death." 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 135 
 
 Wkai do you think to be the author's motive in this explanation ? Is it 
 pure pedantry ? 
 
 What generalizatioti can you wake about the clearness and thorough- 
 ness of De Qui7icey's explanations f 
 
 (25) Chance of evading it. Compare this hypothetical case with the 
 one the author describes later. 
 
 What is the author's seeming purpose in dwelling upon this idea at this 
 time ? 
 
 In what way does this philosophizing prepare for the " vision " ? 
 
 (26) Nature, from her seat, etc. This quotation is from the ninth 
 book of Paradise Lost : — 
 
 " So saying, her rash hand in evil hour 
 Forth reaching to the fruit, she pluck'd, she eat : 
 Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat 
 Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe, 
 That all was lost." 
 
 What does De Quincey reveal of himself in this paragraph ? 
 State the substance of the paragraph in a single sentence. 
 What is the effect produced upon the mind of the reader by these last 
 paragraphs ? 
 
 (27) The down mail. The mail from London, The mail to Lon- 
 don was the up mail. 
 
 Jus dominii. Right of ownership. 
 Jus gentium. Law of nations. 
 
 What differences are apparent betweett the author's manner in this 
 paragraph and in the preceding ? 
 
 What is the effect of the change on the reader'' s interest? 
 What romantic circumstances does the author introduce ? What ele- 
 ments of humor ? 
 
 (28) Assessor. By derivation this word means " one who sits 
 beside." 
 
 Calendars. The calendars, or dervishes, are Mohammedan monks 
 who devote their lives to preaching, going from place to place, living 
 entirely upon alms. 
 
 Al Sirat. This is the bridge, according to the Mohammedan faith, 
 over which souls pass to the next world. It is so narrow that the wicked 
 fall off into the bottomless pit. 
 
 What effect is produced by the description of the driver f 
 
 What kind of expectancy is aroused in the reader ? By what means ? 
 
136 NOTES 
 
 What is it that makes these paragraphs genuinely interesting? 
 
 (29) What is the author's purpose in eviphasizlng the loss of an hour ? 
 What expectancy is aroused by the remark, " For the moment I detect 
 
 no changes in the energy or in the skill of the Cyclops " ? 
 
 (30) Aurigation. This is a word of De Quincey's coining. Its 
 literal meaning is charioteering. What is the effect of its use here ? 
 
 Seven atmospheres. The pressure of one atmosphere is fifteen 
 pounds to the square inch. 
 
 Point out and explain some other humorous expressions. 
 
 What is the feeling that De Quincey tries to arouse in the reader by the 
 preparatory details given at the close of this paragraph ? 
 
 By what means does he suggest coming trouble? 
 
 (31) What is the effect of this digression on the reader ? 
 What does it reveal of the author's habits ofmitid? 
 
 (32) What are the romantic characteristics of the situation? Of the 
 scene ? 
 
 What is the effect of the meditative mood of De Quincey at this time ? 
 What produces the effect of mystery ? 
 
 (33) What is the atithor s purpose in speaking of his inability to act? 
 By what means does he create suspense throughout the paragraph ? 
 Do you find details that do not aid the author's purpose? 
 
 What is the author s purpose in suggesting that the coming vehicle is 
 four miles off? 
 
 (34) Knock me. This use of me is common among the old writers. 
 (36) Shout of Achilles. This is a reference to the terror which 
 
 Achilles struck to the Trojans. In Pope's .translation the account runs 
 as follows : — 
 
 " Forth marched the chief, and distant from the crowd, 
 High on the rampart raised his voice aloud ; 
 With her own shout Minerva swells the sound, 
 Troy starts astonished, and the shores rebound. . . . 
 Thrice from the trench his dreadful voice he raised, 
 And thrice they fled, confounded and amazed." 
 By what means does De Quincey make us feel the seriousness of the 
 situation ? 
 
 (37-40) What is De Quincey's object in movi?tg so slowly toward the 
 crisis ? 
 
 In what way does the author reveal his own personal feelings? Are 
 they made prominefit ? 
 
 What is the author's chief purpose in this narrative ? 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 137 
 
 Upon just what does he centre our interest ? 
 
 By what details does he make us feel most strongly the situation ? 
 
 (43) Woman's Ionic form. The Ionic is considered the most grace- 
 ful and finely beautiful of the three styles of classical Greek architec- 
 ture. 
 
 What effect is produced by the use here of apostrophe as a literary form f 
 
 (44) Corymbi. The plural of corymbus, a cluster of flowers, or of 
 fruit. 
 
 Explain by what elements of the preceding narrative, the various phases 
 of this dream are suggested. 
 
 (45) Quarrel. The shaft from a crossbow, an arrow with a four- 
 edged head. 
 
 Point otct the chief differences between this dream and the preceding. 
 
 (46-47) Funeral bells. Read the passage aloud and try to give 
 expression to the soft, solemn music of the opening, which gradually 
 changes, turning in the end into the tumultuous movement of a paean 
 of victory. 
 
 In what respects is this like a real dream ? 
 
 By what incidents of the preceding narrative are the various phases of 
 this dreatn suggested ? 
 
 (48) Waterloo and Recovered Christendom ! This indicates the great 
 relief felt by England over the outcome of the Continental struggle. 
 De Quincey as a rigid Tory experienced double delight in the event. 
 
 Show how this dream follows naturally from the preceding. 
 
 Show that the facts for its foundation are contained i?i the incidents of 
 the preceding parts of the essay. 
 
 (50) A Dying Trumpeter. " 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." — De Quincey. 
 
 By what means does the author make this dream fnore mysterious than 
 the preceding dreams ? 
 
 Does the added mystery increase the effectiveness f Give your reasons. 
 In what does the vividness of the passage consist? 
 Explain the meaning of the close of this dreain. 
 
 (51) The dreadful sanctus. The hymn Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God 
 of Hosts. 
 
 Which of the dreams is inore vivid? 
 
 By what means are the dreams made vivid ? 
 
138 NOTES 
 
 One sling of His victorious arm. This is an echo of Milton : — 
 " At one sling 
 Of thy victorious arm, well pleasing Son, 
 Both Sin and Death, and yawning Grave, at last, 
 Through Chaos hurled, obstruct the mouth of Hell, 
 For ever, and seal up his ravenous jaws," 
 
 — Paradise Lost, X. 663. 
 
 AUTHOR'S COMMENTS 
 
 In revising this essay, in 1854, for the Collective Edition of his works 
 the author prefixed the following explanations : — 
 
 "' The E7iglish Mail-Coach' : — 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 these 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 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. This 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 
 
THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 139 
 
 mail, was transformed info 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 wit- 
 nessed them moving in ghostly silence; this duel between life and 
 death, narrowing itself to a point of such exquisite evanescence as the 
 collision nearcd ; 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 — ist, in velocity 
 unprecedented ; 2dly, in the power and beauty of the horses ; sdly, 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 dis- 
 tinctions 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 exclu- 
 sively 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 licence of our privi- 
 lege. 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 fea- 
 tures 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 — viz. an arrow-like sec- 
 tion of the road, six hundred yards long, under the solemn lights de- 
 scribed, 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." 
 
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