Narrative and Miscellaneous PapersDe Quincey, Thomas
General
Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers
De Quincey, Thomas
English essays; English fiction
Against Lord Hutchinson, we never heard him plead anything of moment,
except that he was finically Frenchified in his diction; of which he
gave this instance--that having occasion to notice a brick wall, (which
was literally _that_, not more and not less,) when reconnoitring the
French defences, he called it a _revêtement_. And we ourselves remember
his using the French word _gloriole_ rather ostentatiously; that is,
when no particular emphasis attached to the case. But every man has his
foibles; and few, perhaps, are less conspicuously annoying than this of
Lord Hutchinson's. Sir Sidney's crimes were less distinctly revealed
to our mind. As to Cuvier, Coleridge's hatred of _him_ was more to our
taste; for (though quite unreasonable, we fear) it took the shape of
patriotism. He insisted on it, that our British John Hunter was the
genuine article, and that Cuvier was a humbug. Now, speaking privately
to the public, we cannot go quite so far as _that_. But, when publicly
we address that most respectable character, _en grand costume_,
we always mean to back Coleridge. For we are a horrible John Bull
ourselves. As Joseph Hume observes, it makes no difference to us--right
or wrong, black or white--when our countrymen are concerned. And John
Hunter, notwithstanding he had a bee in his bonnet, [Footnote: _Vide_,
in particular, for the most exquisite specimen of pigheadedness that the
world can furnish, his perverse evidence on the once famous case at the
Warwick assizes, of Captain Donelan for poisoning his brother-in-law,
Sir Theodosius Boughton.] was really a great man; though it will not
follow that Cuvier must, therefore, have been a little one. We do not
pretend to be acquainted with the tenth part of Cuvier's performances;
but we suspect that Coleridge's range in that respect was not much
greater than our own.
Other cases of monomaniac antipathy we might revive from our
recollections of Coleridge, had we a sufficient motive. But in
compensation, and by way of redressing the balance, he had many strange
likings--equally monomaniac--and, unaccountably, he chose to exhibit his
whimsical partialities by dressing up, as it were, in his own clothes,
such a set of scarecrows as eye has not beheld. Heavens! what an ark
of unclean beasts would have been Coleridge's private _menagerie_
of departed philosophers, could they all have been trotted out in
succession! But did the reader feel them to be the awful bores which,
in fact, they were? No; because Coleridge had blown upon these withered
anatomies, through the blowpipe of his own creative genius, a stream of
gas that swelled the tissue of their antediluvian wrinkles, forced color
upon their cheeks, and splendor upon their sodden eyes. Such a process
of ventriloquism never _has_ existed. He spoke by their organs. They
were the tubes; and he forced through their wooden machinery his own
Beethoven harmonies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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