The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1

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The final result of this carnage was not so terrific as it threatened to be. Some, I think, recovered; but, also, one, who did _not_ recover, was unhappily a stranger to the who...

Great changes summon to great meditations. Daily we see the most joyous of events take a colouring of solemnity from the mere relation in which they stand to an uncertain future...

Hence, therefore, a case of legislation in St. Paul's Christian administration, which I will venture to say few readers understand. Take the Feast of Ephesus. Here, as in all ci...

Such was the prodigious state of separation from a Mahometan principle of fanatical proselytism in which the Jews were placed from the very first. One small district only was to...

It is true that Pilate could not be expected fully to comprehend an idea which was yet new to man; Christ's words were beyond his depth. But, still, his natural light would guid...

[9] Notwithstanding what he had written in the essay on the 'Essenes,' no doubt De Quincey, if he had completed this paper, could not have escaped characteristic, and perhaps gr...

We have heard from a man who witnessed the failure of Miss Baillie's 'De Montford,' notwithstanding the scenic advantages of a vast London theatre, fine dresses, fine music at i...

Take his 'Life of Savage.' This was the original nest-egg, upon which, as a basis, and perhaps as the occasional suggestion of such an enterprise, all the rest--allow us a pompo...

But Horace Walpole roundly and audaciously affirmed in the first sentence of his preface to the poor romance of 'Otranto,' that it had been translated from the Italian of Onuphr...

As to Mr. O'Connell himself, it is useless, and it argues some thick darkness of mind, to remonstrate or generally to address any arguments from whatsoever quarter, which either...

But let us indulge in the luxury of confirming what we have said by the light of contrast. Suppose the circumstances changed, suppose them reversed, and then all those evil cons...

Time, therefore, that ancient enemy of man and his frail purposes, how potent an ally has it become in combination with great mechanic changes! Many an imperfect hemisphere of t...

Upon this explanation it is perfectly consistent with a general belief in the going forward of man--that this particular age in which we live might be stationary, or might even...

_The Tendency of a Good Fortune inherited._--I know not that any man has reason to wish a _sufficient_ patrimonial estate for his son. Much to have something so as to start with...

The word 'modern' is therefore in Shakespeare uniformly to be pronounced with the long _o_, as in the words m_o_dal, m_o_dish, and never with the short _o_ of m[)o]derate, m[)o]...

Religion under any of its aspects, revealing or consoling--religion in connection with any of its affinities, ethics or metaphysics, when _self_-evoked by a person of earnest na...

_For my Book on the Relations of Christianity to Man._--S. T. C. cites Jeremy Taylor, etc., for horrible passages on the gloomy state of the chances for virtuous Pagans. S. T. C...

_The Truth._--But what tongue can express, what scale can measure, the awful change in man's relations to the unseen world? Where there had been a blank not filled by anything,...

These ideas of God have life only by their own inherent power: yet what risk that Jews should lapse into supposing themselves separately a favoured people? By this very error th...

One great evil, as in practice it had begun to show itself, pressed with equal injustice on the party who suffered from it (viz., the nation), and the party who seemed to reap i...

_Bookbinding and Book-Lettering._--Literature is a mean thing enough in the ordinary way of pursuing it as what the Germans call a _Brodstudium_; but in its higher relations it...

In his autobiographic sketch, 'Introduction to the World of Strife,' he tells of his brother's enterprise in establishing the _Gazette_, which was to record their doings, and al...

At six years of age, or thereabouts (I write without any memorial notes), the glory of this earth for me was extinguished. _It is finished_--not those words but that sentiment--...