Authors, English -- 19th century -- Biography; De Quincey, Thomas, 1785-1859
the heart should disown--the enmities of one's own family, or country,
or religious sect. In forms how afflicting must that necessity have
sometimes occurred during the Parliamentary war! And, in after years,
amongst our beautiful old English metrical romances, I found the same
impassioned complaint uttered by a knight, Sir Ywain, as early as A.D.
1240--
"But now, where'er I stray or go,
My heart SHE has that is my foe!"
I knew--I anticipated to a certainty--that my brother would not hear
of any merit belonging to the factory population whom every day we had
to meet in battle; on the contrary, even submission on _their_ part,
and willingness to walk penitentially through the _Furcae Caudinae_,
would hardly have satisfied his sense of their criminality. Often,
indeed, as we came in view of the factory, he would shake his fist at
it, and say, in a ferocious tone of voice, "_Delenda est Carthago!_"
And certainly, I thought to myself, it must be admitted by every body,
that the factory people are inexcusable in raising a rebellion against
my brother. But still rebels were men, and sometimes were women; and
rebels, that stretch out their petticoats like fans for the sake of
screening one from the hot pursuit of enemies with fiery eyes, (green
or otherwise,) really are not the sort of people that one wishes to
hate.
Homewards, therefore, I drew in sadness, and little doubting that
_hereafter_ I might have verbal feuds with my brother on behalf of my
fair friends, but not dreaming how much displeasure I had already
incurred by my treasonable collusion with their caresses. That part
of the affair he had seen with his own eyes, from his position on the
field; and then it was that he left me indignantly to my fate, which,
by my first reception, it was easy to see would not prove very gloomy.
When I came into our own study, I found him engaged in preparing a
_bulletin_, (which word was just then travelling into universal use,)
reporting briefly the events of the day. The art of drawing, as I shall
again have occasion to mention, was amongst his foremost accomplishments;
and round the margin of the border ran a black border, ornamented with
cyprus and other funereal emblems. When finished, it was carried into the
room of Mrs. Evans. This Mrs. Evans was an important person in our
affairs. My mother, who never chose to have any direct communication with
her servants, always had a housekeeper for the regulation of all domestic
business; and the housekeeper, for some years, was this Mrs. Evans. Into
her private parlor, where she sat aloof from the under servants, my
brother and I had the _entrée_ at all times, but upon very different
terms of acceptance: he as a favorite of the first class; _I_, by
sufferance, as a sort of gloomy shadow that ran after _his_ person, and
could not well be shut out if _he_ were let in. Him she admired in the
very highest degree; myself, on the contrary, she detested, which made me
unhappy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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