[26] William Roscoe (1753-1831), author of Life of Lorenzo de' Medici, Life and Pontificate of Leo X, and other works, was a native of Liverpool, and spent the main part of his life as a banker in that town.—M.
[27] The Rev. William Shepherd, author of a Life of Poggio Bracciolini (Liverpool, 1802) and Paris in 1802 and 1814 (London, 1814), and joint author of a work in two volumes called Systematic Education, or Elementary Instruction in the various Departments of Literature and Science (London, 1815).—M.
[28] Dr. James Currie, born 1756, a native of Dumfriesshire, settled in Liverpool, in medical practice, in 1781. His edition of Burns, with memoir and criticism, published in 1800, was for the benefit of the widow and children of the poet, and realised £1400. Currie died in 1805.—M.
[29] Wordsworth's publication was in 1816, under the title A Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns, occasioned by an intended Republication of the Account of the Life of Burns by Dr. Currie. By William Wordsworth.—M.
[30] Jacobinism—although the seminal principle of all political evil in all ages alike of advanced civilization—is natural to the heart of man, and, in a qualified sense, may be meritorious. A good man, a high-minded man, in certain circumstances, must be a Jacobin in a certain sense. The aspect under which Burns's Jacobinism appears is striking: there is a thought which an observing reader will find often recurring, which expresses its peculiar bitterness. It is this: the necessity which in old countries exists for the labourer humbly to beg permission that he may labour. To eat in the sweat of a man's brow—that is bad; and that is a curse, and pronounced such by God. But, when that is all, the labourer is by comparison happy. The second curse makes that a jest: he must sue, he must sneak, he must fawn like an Oriental slave, in order to win his fellow-man, in Burns's indignant words, "to give him leave to toil." That was the scorpion thought that was for ever shooting its sting into Burns's meditations, whether forward-looking or backward-looking; and, that considered, there arises a world of allowance for that vulgar bluster of independence which Lord Jeffrey, with so much apparent reason charges upon his prose writings.
[31] De Quincey's strictures in this paper of 1837 on the Liverpool literary coterie of 1801 gave great offence in that town. The Liverpool papers attacked him for it; and Dr. Shepherd of Gatacre, apparently then the sole survivor of the coterie, addressed a letter of remonstrance to the editor of Tait's Magazine. It appeared in the number of the magazine for May 1837, with some editorial comments. "The question of which I have to treat," wrote Dr. Shepherd, "is a question of accuracy of recollection; and I am constrained to remark that, as, from the appellation by which, with an extraordinary kind of taste, Mr. De Quincey chooses to designate himself in his literary character, he seems to have been at one period of his life the slave of a deleterious drug, which shakes the nerves, and, inflaming the brain, impairs the memory, whilst I have avoided that poison even in its medical application, therefore my recollection is more likely to be correct that his." The letter proceeds to vindicate Dr. Currie, Mr. Roscoe, and the writer himself, from the charge of defective appreciation of the manly demeanour of Burns in his relations with the Scottish aristocracy and lairds; after which come some words of special self-defence of the writer in the matters of his political consistency and his jests at Hannah More. The letter altogether is destitute of effective point; and the editor of Tait was quite justified in standing by De Quincey. This is done in every particular of the offending paper, with this included sting: "It may tempt a smile from the few who are likely to trouble themselves about this foolish affair to find that, though solemnly assuming the office of advocate-general for the other members of the extinct coterie, Dr. Shepherd, as well as the newspaper writers, has entirely overlooked the vivacious tailor celebrated by Mr. De Quincey, of whom we think none of his literary friends have the least reason to be ashamed."—— The main matter of interest now in this little controversy of 1837 respects De Quincey's own estimate of Burns. Although he had taken up the cudgels for Burns in that particular in which he thought Dr. Currie and the rest of the Liverpool coterie of 1801, professed democrats though they were, had done Burns injustice,—viz. his spirit of manly independence and superiority to considerations of mere worldly rank,—it remains true that De Quincey's own estimate of Burns all in all fell woefully beneath the proper mark. There are evidences of this in the present paper, and there are other evidences at different points of De Quincey's life. Wordsworth in this respect differed immensely from his friend De Quincey, and might have taught him better. In that letter of Wordsworth's which is referred to by De Quincey (ante, p. 131) precisely because it had deprecated the republication in 1816 of Dr. Currie's Life of Burns in 1800, how enthusiastic was the feeling for Burns and his memory compared with anything that De Quincey seems ever to have permitted himself! And, as long before as 1803, had not Wordsworth, in his lines At the Grave of Burns, given expression to the same feeling in more personal shape? Who can forget that deathless stanza in which, remembering that Burns had died so recently, and that, though they had never met, they had been near neighbours by their places of habitation, the new poet of England had confessed his own indebtedness to the example of the Scottish ploughman bard?—
"I mourned with thousands, but as one
More deeply grieved; for He was gone
Whose light I hailed, when first it shone
And showed my youth
How verse may build a princely throne
On humble truth."
In connexion with the fact of De Quincey's defective appreciation of Burns even so late as 1837, it is additionally significant that, though he refers in the present paper, with modified approbation, to Jeffrey's somewhat captious article on Burns in the Edinburgh Review for January 1809, he does not mention the compensation which had appeared, with Jeffrey's own editorial sanction, in the shape of Carlyle's essay on Burns in the same Review for December 1828.—M.
[32] This chapter is composed of four articles contributed to Tait's Magazine under the title of "Samuel Taylor Coleridge: By the English Opium-Eater." They appeared, respectively, in the numbers of the Magazine for September, October, and November 1834, and January 1835. Three of these articles were revised by De Quincey, and thrown into one paper for Vol. II of the Collective Edition of his writings, published in 1854. The fourth article was not included in that paper; but it is added to the reprint of the paper in the American Collective Edition of De Quincey, and is necessary to complete his sketch of Coleridge. It is therefore reproduced here. The reader will understand, accordingly, that as far as to p. 208 we follow De Quincey's revised text of three of his Coleridge articles; after which we have to print the fourth article as it originally stood in Tait.—M.
[33] Published in 1798.—M.