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Updated: June 20, 2025
In this incident we see what infinite majesty invested the very semblance of humanity in De Quincey's thoughts: and something of the same remarkable courtesy was manifested by Rufus Choate, who uniformly addressed the lowest of women in the witness-box as if they were every one of them worthy of the most queenly consideration.
Rhoda's first movement was to capture Miss Quincey's hand as it wildly reconnoitred for a pocket handkerchief among the pillows. "Don't worry about it," she said, "I'll speak to Miss Cursiter." Dr. Cautley, enduring a perfunctory five minutes with Mrs. Moon, could hear Miss Vivian running downstairs and the front door opening and closing upon her.
It is the outcome of the fierce animal lust for blood, provoked by low passions working in low minds. De Quincey's brilliant attempt to elevate it to a place among the fine arts has only enriched its horrors as an abstract idea. Even detached from its usual environment of darkness, and ignorance, and vice, it is an ugly thing. But here was something quite different.
She was handed over next term to Miss Quincey's brilliant and efficient successor, who made her work hard, with the result that the Mad Hatter got ill of a brain fever just before the Christmas holidays and was never fit for any more work; and never became Classical Mistress or anything else in the least distinguished. But this is by the way.
The true distinction between prose and poetry he regarded as the almost technical or accidental one of the absence or presence of metrical beauty, or, say! metrical restraint; and for him the opposition came to be between verse and prose of course; but, as the essential dichotomy in this matter, between imaginative and unimaginative writing, parallel to De Quincey's distinction between "the literature of power and the literature of knowledge," in the former of which the composer gives us not fact, but his peculiar sense of fact, whether past or present.
Levity is an element farthest removed from his humor; in fact, whenever he allows himself to indulge in humor at all, you may be sure that murder is going on somewhere in the vicinity, a tragedy of pretty frequent occurrence in De Quincey's works. There was sufficient humor in De Quincey to have endowed a dozen Aristophaneses.
De Quincey's kind feeling, I wrote to him, and yesterday I had a charming letter from his daughter, saying how much her father was gratified by mine, that he had already written an answer, amounting to a good-sized pamphlet, but that when it would be finished was doubtful, so she sent hers as a precursor. Swallowfield, November 11, 1852.
Mrs. Stowe's "Dred" seems dim and melodramatic beside the actual Nat Turner, and De Quincey's "Avenger" is his only parallel in imaginative literature. Mr. Gray, his counsel, rises into a sort of bewildered enthusiasm with the prisoner before him. "I shall not attempt to describe the effect of his narrative, as told and commented on by himself, in the condemned-hole of the prison.
It is impossible to be exhaustive upon such a subject as that which I have undertaken. I shall select, therefore, two prominent centres, about which the thoughts which I wish to present naturally revolve: De Quincey's childhood, and his opium-experiences.
If anyone should ever write a treatise on the art of murder not an exhibition of literary fireworks like De Quincey's, but a genuine working treatise he might leave all other technical details to take care of themselves if he could describe some really practicable plan for disposing of the body. That is, and always has been, the great stumbling-block to the murderer: to get rid of the body.
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