The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2De Quincey, Thomas
General
The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2
De Quincey, Thomas
English essays
was made much _more_ graspless, and in this way the very graces of his
moral nature ministered eventually the heaviest of his curses. Most
unworldly he was, most unmercenary, and (as somebody has remarked) even
to a disease, and, in such a degree as if an organ had been forgotten by
Nature in his composition, disregardful of self. But even in these
qualities lay the baits for his worldly ruin, which subsequently caused
or allowed so much of his misery. Partly from the introversion of his
mind, and its habitual sleep of reverie in relation to all external
interests, partly from his defect in all habits of prudential
forecasting, resting his head always on the pillow of the _present_--he
had been carried rapidly past all openings that offered towards the
creation of a fortune before he even heard of them, and he first awoke
to the knowledge that such openings had ever existed when he looked back
upon them from a distance, and found them already irrecoverable for
ever.
Such a case as this, as soon as it became known that the case stood
connected with so much power of intellect and so much of various
erudition, was the very ideal case that challenges aid from the public
purse. Mrs. Coleridge has feelingly noticed the philosophic fact. It was
the case of a man lame in the faculties which apply to the architecture
of a fortune, but lame through the very excess in some other faculties
that qualified him for a public teacher, or (which is even more
requisite) for a public stimulator of powers else dormant.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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