[82] Inquiry into the Effects of Fermented Liquors. By a Waterdrinker. London. 1814.—M.
[83] "Birmingham Doctor":—This was a sobriquet imposed on Dr. Parr by "The Pursuits of Literature," that most popular of satires at the end of the eighteenth and opening of the nineteenth centuries. The name had a mixed reference to the Doctor's personal connexion with Warwickshire, but chiefly to the Doctor's spurious and windy imitation of Dr. Johnson. He was viewed as the Birmingham (or mock) Dr. Johnson. Why the word Birmingham has come for the last sixty or seventy years to indicate in every class of articles the spurious in opposition to the genuine, I suppose to have arisen from the Birmingham habit of reproducing all sorts of London or Paris trinkets, bijouterie, &c., in cheaper materials and with inferior workmanship.
[84] It is at this point that De Quincey's revised reprint in 1854 of his Recollections of Coleridge stops. What follows is from the unrevised sequel in Tait's Magazine for January 1835. See note, ante, p. 138.—M.
[85] The Mr. M—— of this sentence was Mr. John Morgan. He had known Coleridge and Southey in Bristol, and now lived in London.—M.
[86] Coleridge died at Highgate, 25th July 1834, in the sixty-second year of his age, and the eighteenth of his residence with Mr. Gillman.—M.
[87] "Esemplastic":—A writer in "Blackwood," who carried a wrath into the discussion for which I and others found it hard to account, made it a sort of charge against myself, that I had overlooked this remarkable case. If I had, there would have been no particular reason for anger or surprise, seeing that the particular German work in which these plagiarisms were traced had been lent to me under most rigorous limitations as to the time for returning it; the owner of the volume was going out of London, and a very few hours (according to my present remembrance only two) were all that he could allow me for hunting through the most impracticable of metaphysical thickets (what Coleridge elsewhere calls "the holy jungle of metaphysics"). Meantime I had not overlooked the case of esemplastic; I had it in my memory, but hurry of the press and want of room obliged me to omit a good deal. Indeed, if such omissions constituted any reproach, then the critic in "Blackwood" was liable to his own censure. For I remember to this hour several Latin quotations made by Schelling, and repeated by Coleridge as his own, which neither I nor my too rigorous reviewer had drawn out for public exposure. As regarded myself, it was quite sufficient that I had indicated the grounds, and opened the paths, on which the game must be sought; that I left the rest of the chase to others, was no subject for blame, but part of my purpose; and, under the circumstances, very much a matter of necessity.—In taking leave of this affair, I ought to point out a ground of complaint against my reviewer under his present form of expression, which I am sure could not have been designed. It happened that I had forgotten the particular title of Schelling's work; naturally enough, in a situation where no foreign books could be had, I quoted it under a false one. And this inevitable error of mine on a matter so entirely irrelevant is so described that the neutral reader might suppose me to have committed against Coleridge the crime of Lauder against Milton—that is, taxing him with plagiarism by referring, not to real works of Schelling, but to pretended works, of which the very titles were forgeries of my own. This, I am sure, my unknown critic never could have meant. The plagiarisms were really there; more and worse in circumstances than any denounced by myself; and, of all men, the "Blackwood" critic was the most bound to proclaim this; or else what became of his own clamorous outcry? Being, therefore, such as I had represented, of what consequence was the special title of the German volume to which these plagiarisms were referred?—[The reference in this footnote, written by De Quincey in 1854, is to an article on "The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge," which had appeared in Blackwood for March 1840, the writer of which had animadverted on De Quincey's previous disclosures on the subject in his Tait papers of 1834-5.—M.]
[88] Composed of articles in Tait's Magazine for January, February, and April 1839, as revised and recast by De Quincey, published, with some additions, for the second volume of the Collective Edinburgh Edition of his writings in 1854.—M.
[89] Ante, p. 59.—M.
[90] At the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where the town is viewed as a mere ministerial appendage to the numerous colleges—the civic Oxford, for instance, existing for the sake of the academic Oxford, and not vice versâ—it has naturally happened that the students honour with the name of "a man" him only who wears a cap and gown.
[91] See the divine passage (in the Sixth Book of "The Excursion") beginning—