Suspiria de Profundis, Thomas De Quincey [cool books to read .txt] 📗

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 army 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 flagrant délit.” 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. ↩

I speak of the era previous to Waterloo. ↩

Of 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 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 worthwhile 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, consequently, 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 had 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 destiny 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 wretches, 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 magnificent country that in many a direction for a thousand miles I will engage that a dog shall not find shelter from a snowstorm, nor a wren find an apology for breakfast.” ↩

I must observe that the colour of green suffers almost a spiritual change and exaltation under the effect of Bengal lights. ↩

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 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! ↩

There were at that time only two assizes even in the most populous counties⁠—viz., the Lent Assizes and the Summer Assizes. ↩

I owe the suggestion of this word to an obscure remembrance of a beautiful phrase in Giraldus Cambrensis⁠—viz., suspiriosæ cogitationes. ↩

It is true that, according to the law of the case as established 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. ↩

This is the technical word, and, I presume, derived from the French cartayer, to evade a rut or any obstacle. ↩

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. ↩

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 imagine. 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 flat 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. ↩

Some readers may be apt to suppose, from all English experience, that the word “exorcise” means properly banishment to the shades. Not so. Citation from the shades, or sometimes the torturing