EDITOR'S PREFACE THIS volume continues the series of De Quincey's papers specially entitled to the name of HISTORICAL ESSAYS AND RESEARCHES. The difference from the last volume is that, while in the papers placed first in this volume we are still in what is called Ancient History, we shoot suddenly in the others into Modern History, and chiefly into Recent Modern History. Eight of the nine papers are from Blackwood's Magazine; and the dates, &c., are appended to the papers individually. One is from Tait's Magazine. In The Casuistry of Roman Meals De Quincey propounds, and maintains most amusingly, a discovery or paradox of his own, to the effect that there was no recognised meal in the Roman day corresponding to our modern "breakfast," but only a hasty morning munch of a bit of bread or a few raisins by the side of a wall or anywhere else in the open air, and that this uncomfortable habit, or defect of habit, might be traced into important consequences and ramifications through Roman social life. In The Pagan Oracles he set himself to combat the poetical tradition, so memorably enshrined in a passage in Rabelais, and also in Milton's "Ode on the Nativity," to neither of which, however, does he specially refer, that at the coming of Christ the Pagan Oracles suddenly ceased, their gods and all their machinery of priests and priestesses having been struck dumb at once by the advent of the real and supreme Divinity. He maintains that this tradition was originally a fiction or pious fraud of the Early Christian Fathers, incredible a priori, and confuted by facts abundantly proving not only that the Oracles did VOL. VII B not suddenly cease at the time alleged, but that the struggle between the paraphernalia of Paganism and the power of Christianity was a long and arduous affair indeed, protracted through several centuries. In the course of this learned argument, conducted though it is with the most passionate sympathy with the Christian side and detestation of the Pagan, he takes occasion to say what good he honestly can on behalf of the Oracles themselves and their social functions, and to reprobate with due scorn the vulgar modern hypothesis which would resolve all things of the sort into mere old priestcraft and imposture. In The Essenes De Quincey is within a favourite ring-fence of his own devising. From the days of his bookish privacy at Grasmere before he began regular authorship,-for he informs us that the paper, or the first draft of it, had been written as early as 1821,-this had been pre-eminently his pet historical subject. He had convinced himself, it seems, that the so-called Hebrew sect of the Essenes, described by the Jewish historian Josephus as a school of Hebrew mystics, distinct from both the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and banded together by peculiar spiritual beliefs and a peculiarly strict and lofty morality, was either a pure fabrication of Josephus to discredit Christianity by robbing it of all claim to originality, or was nothing else than Christianity itself, imperfectly described by Josephus after he had become a renegade from it, and for the same insidious purpose of making it out to have been, in any case, but a native mushroom from the Hebrew soil. This is the thesis of the Blackwood article on the Essenes published in 1840; and how strongly it possessed De Quincey appears from his recurring to it in his paper entitled Secret Societies, published in 1847 in Tait's Magazine. In that paper, indeed, he ranges about a little among Secret Societies generally, but only to revert with his full strength to the Essenes as the most interesting Secret Society of all, repeat the views of his Blackwood article on that subject with some modifications, and come down again most unmercifully with his hammer on poor Josephus. Nay, not content with his re-treatment of this subject in the text of his Tait paper, nor with the pungent paragraphs on the same subject of Essenism which he had inserted in his General Preface of 1853 to the then com |