Miscellaneous Essays

It is the intention of the publishers to issue, at intervals, a complete collection of Mr. De Quincey's Writings, uniform with this volume. The first four volumes of the series...

Really, gentlemen, I beg pardon for so much philosophy at one time, and now let me apply it. When a murder is in the paulo-post-futurum tense, and a rumor of it comes to our ear...

Bounce or not bounce, however, certain it is, that Hobbes, to the end of his life, feared that somebody would murder him. This is proved by the story I am going to tell you: it...

With respect to Williams's murders, the sublimest and most entire in their excellence that ever were committed, I shall not allow myself to speak incidentally. Nothing less than...

The world was wrong _there_, as it has been on some other questions. Toad-in-the-hole might be sleeping, but dead he was not; and of that we soon had ocular proof. One morning i...

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--like the Hebrew shepherd boy from the hills and for...

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, becaus...

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 _have_ lost, all sobriety of mind when stand...

Bishop of Beauvais! because the guilt-burthened man is in dreams haunted and waylaid by the most frightful of his crimes, and because upon that fluctuating mirror--rising (like...

Such now being, at that time, the usages of mail-coaches, what was to be done by us of young Oxford? We, the most aristocratic of people, who were addicted to the practice of lo...

Miss Fanny of the Bath road, strictly speaking, lived at a mile's distance from that road, but came so continually to meet the mail, that I on my frequent transits rarely missed...

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 approaching us anothe...

The situation here contemplated exposes a dreadful ulcer, lurking far down in the depths of human nature. It is not that men generally are summoned to face such awful trials. Bu...

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, meeting high overh...

Thus, as we ran like torrents--thus, as we swept with bridal rapture over the Campo Santo[1] of the cathedral graves--suddenly we became aware of a vast necropolis rising upon t...

"Well," you say, "No matter if it had passed fifty times--and through the fires of Moloch; only let us have this biscuit, such as it is." In good faith, then, fasting reader, yo...

II. We have to offer another fact, ruinous to our dictionaries on another ground. Various circumstances have disguised the truth, but a truth it is, that "prandium", in its very...

This revolution as to dinner was the greatest in virtue and value ever accomplished. In fact, those are always the most operative revolutions which are brought about through soc...