APPENDED NOTE

As De Quincey's long and interesting Chapter on Oxford from 1803 to 1808 leaves the incidents of his own passage through the University rather hazy, the following condensation of particulars on the subject may not be unwelcome. They are partly from one of his own conversations in 1821 with Richard Woodhouse (the notes of which conversations are appended to Mr. Garnett's edition in 1885 of the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater), partly from an article in the Quarterly Review for July 1861 containing information supplied by Dr. Cotton of Worcester College, and partly from information collected by Mr. Page for his Life of De Quincey:-Admitted into Worcester College on the 17th of December 1803, he did for the first two years of his residence lead, as he tells us, a very solitary life, withdrawing himself from wine-parties, and frequenting chiefly the society of a German named Schwartzburg. Even then, however, he had the reputation with some in the college of being, though of shy and quaint ways, a man of uncommon genius and erudition; and, latterly, as this reputation spread in the college, and some inevitable appearances of his in college declamations and the like confirmed it, he became the object of more general attention, and was urged to go up for honours in taking his degree. He did attend the first examination for B. A. honours at Michaelmas in the year 1808, with the result that Dr. Goodenough of Christ Church, who was one of the examiners, is said to have told one of the Worcester College dons, "You have sent us to-day the cleverest man I ever met with; if his viva voce examination tomorrow correspond with what he has done in writing, he will carry everything before him." De Quincey's own account to Mr. Woodhouse was that the examination was an oral one and in Latin; which agrees more with the possibility of such a report from Dr. Goodenough on the same day. De Quincey further adds that this examination was on a Saturday, and that the remaining examination, which was to follow on Monday, was to be in Greek. He had been looking forward to this examination with much interest, his Greek readings having been of wide range and in many directions out of the ordinary academic track; and his interest had been increased by the regulation that the answers to the questions were to be wholly or largely in the Greek tongue itself. The fact that this rule had been altered at the last moment had, however, disgusted him; and this, together with "his

contempt for his examiners" and the thought that the examination would be of a kind that would leave his real resources untested, had such an effect upon him that, "when the time came, he was non inventus." Mr. Woodhouse's report from himself is that "on the Sunday morning he left Oxford"; the Worcester College tradition, which is equally precise as to the main fact that he "packed up his things and walked away from Oxford," makes the flight occur in the night following the first examination. Whatever other causes there may have been for the break-down, the opium-eating habit must have been chiefly responsible. That habit had been formed by De Quincey in 1804 in one of those visits of his to London which, with visits to other places, are to be understood as having varied the monotony of his Oxford residence. The habit had grown upon him in his solitude in his college rooms; and part of the college tradition respecting his break-down is that, having taken a large dose of the drug to stimulate him sufficiently for the first day's examination, he was wrecked by the reaction. He took no University degree; and, though his name remained on the college books to as late as 15th December 1810, his real connexion with Oxford ceased in 1808.-D. M.

CHAPTER II

GERMAN STUDIES AND KANT IN PARTICULAR

1

USING a New Testament, of which (in the narrative parts at least) any one word being given will suggest most of what is immediately consecutive, you evade the most irksome of the penalties annexed to the first breaking ground in a new language you evade the necessity of hunting up and down a dictionary. Your own memory, and the inevitable suggestions of the context, furnish a dictionary pro hac vice. And afterwards, upon advancing to other books, where you are obliged to forgo such aids, and to swim without corks, you find yourself already in possession of the particles for expressing addition, succession, exception, inference — in short, of all the forms by which transition or connexion is effected (if, but, and, therefore, however, notwithstanding), together with all those adverbs for modifying or restraining the extent of a subject or a predicate, which in all languages alike compose the essential frame-work or extra-linear machinery of human thought. The filling-up-the matter (in a scholastic sense)-may differ infinitely; but the form, the periphery, the determining moulds into which this matter is fused-all this is the same for ever: and so wonderfully limited in its extent is this frame-work, so narrow and rapidly revolving is the clock-work of connexions among human thoughts, that a dozen pages of almost any book suffice to exhaust all the έπεα πτεροεντα 2 which 1 From Tait's Magazine for June 1836. See ante, Preface, pp. 1, 2.-M.

2 'Еπeа πтEроevтa, literally winged words. To explain the use and origin of this phrase to non-classical readers, it must be understood that, originally, it was used by Homer to express the few, rapid, and

VOL. II

G

Το have mastered these έπεα πτεροεντα is in express them. effect to have mastered seven-tenths, at the least, of any language; and the benefit of using a New Testament, or the familiar parts of an Old Testament, in this preliminary drill, is, that your own memory is thus made to operate as a perpetual dictionary or nomenclator. I have heard Mr. Southey say that, by carrying in his pocket a Dutch, Swedish, or other Testament, on occasion of a long journey performed in "muggy" weather, and in the inside of some venerable "old heavy"-such as used to bestow their tediousness upon our respectable fathers some thirty or forty years ago he had more than once turned to so valuable an account the doziness or the dulness of his fellow-travellers, that, whereas he had “booked" himself at the coach-office utterly ἀναλφαβητος, unacquainted with the first rudiments of the given language, he had made his parting bows to his coach brethren (secretly returning thanks to them for their stupidity) in a condition for grappling with any common book in that dialect. One of the polyglot Old or New Testaments published by Bagster would be a perfect Encyclopædia, or Panorganon, for such a scheme of coach discipline, upon dull roads and in dull company. As respects

the German language in particular, I shall give one caution from my own experience to the self-instructor: it is a caution which applies to the German language exclusively, or to that more than to any other, because the embarrassment which it is meant to meet grows out of a defect of taste characteristic of the German mind. It is this: elsewhere, you would naturally, as a beginner, resort to prose authors, significant words which conveyed some hasty order, counsel, or notice, suited to any sudden occasion or emergency: e.g. "To him flying from the field the hero addressed these winged words-'Stop, coward, or I will transfix thee with my spear.' But by Horne Tooke the phrase was adopted on the title-page of his Diversions of Purley, as a pleasant symbolic expression for all the non-significant particles, the articuli or joints of language, which in his well-known theory are resolved into abbreviations or compendious forms (and therefore rapid, flying, winged forms), substituted for significant forms of greater length. Thus, if is a non-significant particle, but it is an abbreviated form of an imperative in the second person-substituted for gif, or give, or grant the case-put the case that. All other particles are shewn by Horne Tooke to be equally short-hand (or winged) substitutions.

since the license and audacity of poetic thinking, and the large freedom of a poetic treatment, cannot fail to superadd difficulties of individual creation to the general difficulties of a strange dialect. But this rule, good for every other case, is not good for the literature of Germany. Difficulties there certainly are, and perhaps in more than the usual proportion, from the German peculiarities of poetic treatment; but even these are overbalanced in the result by the single advantage of being limited in the extent by the metre, or (as it may happen) by the particular stanza. To German poetry there is a known, fixed, calculable limit. Infinity, absolute infinity, is impracticable in any German metre. Not so with German prose. Style, in any sense, is an inconceivable idea to a German intellect. Take the word in the limited sense of what the Greeks called Συνθεσις ὀνοματων—ie, the construction of sentences-I affirm that a German (unless it were here and there a Lessing) cannot admit such an idea. Books there are in German, and, in other respects, very good books too, which consist of one or two enormous sentences. A German sentence describes an arch between the rising and the setting sun. Take Kant for illustration: he has actually been complimented by the cloud-spinner, Frederick Schlegel, who is now in Hades, as a most original artist in the matter of style. Original" Heaven knows he was! His idea of a sentence was as follows:-We have all seen, or read of, an old family coach, and the process of packing it for a journey to London some seventy or eighty years ago. Night and day, for a week at least, sate the housekeeper, the lady's maid, the butler, the gentleman's gentlemen, &c., packing the huge ark in all its recesses, its "imperials," its "wells," its Salisbury boots," its "sword-cases," its front pockets, side pockets, rear pockets, its "hammer-cloth cellars" (which a lady explains to me as a corruption from hamper-cloth, as originally a cloth for hiding a hamper, stored with viaticum), until all the uses and needs of man, and of human life, savage or civilized, were met with separate provision by the infinite chaos. Pretty nearly upon the model of such an old family coach packing did Kant institute and pursue the packing and stuffing of one of his regular sentences. Everything that could ever be needed in the way of explanation,