Produced by Anne Soulard, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH AND JOAN OF ARC By Thomas De Quincey Edited With Introduction And Notes By Milton Haight Turk, Ph.D. TO CHARLES DEACON CREE THIS LITTLE VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED _Glencairn, Kilmacolm, Scotland June 27, 1905_ PREFACE Some portions of this Introduction have been taken from the Athenæum Press _Selections from De Quincey_; many of the notes have also been transferred from that volume. A number of the new notes I owe to a review of the _Selections_ by Dr. Lane Cooper, of Cornell University. I wish also to thank for many favors the Committee and officers of the Glasgow University Library. If a word by way of suggestion to teachers be pertinent, I would venture to remark that the object of the teacher of literature is, of course, only to fulfill the desire of the author--to make clear his facts and to bring home his ideas in all their power and beauty. Introductions and notes are only means to this end. Teachers, I think, sometimes lose sight of this fact; I know it is fatally easy for students to forget it. That teacher will have rendered a great service who has kept his pupils alive to the real aim of their studies,--to know the author, not to know of him. M.H.T CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. LIFE II. CRITICAL REMARKS III. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE SELECTIONS THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH JOAN OF ARC NOTES INTRODUCTION I. LIFE Thomas de Quincey was born in Manchester on the 15th of August, 1785. His father was a man of high character and great taste for literature as well as a successful man of business; he died, most unfortunately, when Thomas was quite young. Very soon after our author's birth the family removed to The Farm, and later to Greenhay, a larger country place near Manchester. In 1796 De Quincey's mother, now for some years a widow, removed to Bath and placed him in the grammar school there. Thomas, the future opium-eater, was a weak and sickly child. His first years were spent in solitude, and when his elder brother, William, a real boy, came home, the young author followed in humility mingled with terror the diversions of that ingenious and pugnacious "son of eternal racket." De Quincey's mother was a woman of strong character and emotions, as well as excellent mind, but she was excessively formal, and she seems to have inspired more awe than affection in her children, to whom she was for all that deeply devoted. Her notions of conduct in general and of child rearing in particular were very strict. She took Thomas out of Bath School, after three years' excellent work there, because he was too much praised, and kept him for a year at an inferior school at Winkfield in Wiltshire.