[101] See footnote 99, p. [247].—M.
[102] Not many months ago, the blind hostility of the Irish newspaper editors in America forged a ludicrous estimate of the Irish numerical preponderance in the United States, from which it was inferred, as at least a possibility, that the Irish Celtic language might come to dispute the pre-eminence with the English. Others anticipated the same destiny for the German. But, in the meantime, the unresting career of the law-courts, of commerce, and of the national senate, that cannot suspend themselves for an hour, reduce the case to this dilemma: If the Irish and the Germans in the United States adapt their general schemes of education to the service of their public ambition, they must begin by training themselves to the use of the language now prevailing on all the available stages of ambition. On the other hand, by refusing to do this, they lose in the very outset every point of advantage. In other words, adopting the English, they renounce the contest—not adopting it, they disqualify themselves for the contest.
[103] 7th April 1770.—M.
[104] "The present":—This was written about 1835, when the present Earl of Lonsdale meant the late Earl.
[105] Who must now (1854) be classed as the late Earl.
[106] "Eicon Basilike":—By the way, in the lamented Eliot Warburton's "Prince Rupert," this book, by a very excusable mistake, is always cited as the "Eicon Basilicon": he was thinking of the "Doron Basilicon," written by Charles's father: each of the nouns Eicon and Doron, having the same terminal syllable—on—it was most excusable to forget that the first belonged to an imparisyllabic declension, so as to be feminine, the second not so; which made it neuter. With respect to the great standing question as to the authorship of the work, I have myself always held that the natural freedom of judgment in this case has been intercepted by one strong prepossession (entirely false) from the very beginning. The minds of all people have been pre-occupied with the notion that Dr. Gauden, the reputed author, obtained his bishopric confessedly on the credit of that service. Lord Clarendon, it is said, who hated the Doctor, nevertheless gave him a bishopric, on the sole ground of his having written the "Eicon." The inference therefore is that the Prime Minister, who gave so reluctantly, must have given under an irresistible weight of proof that the Doctor really had done the work for which so unwillingly he paid him. Any shade of doubt, such as could have justified Lord Clarendon in suspending this gift, would have been eagerly snatched at. Such a shade, therefore, there was not. Meantime the whole of this reasoning rests upon a false assumption: Dr. Gauden did not owe his bishopric to a belief (true or false) that he had written the "Eicon." The bishopric was given on another account: consequently it cannot, in any way of using the fact, at all affect the presumptions, small or great, which may exist separately for or against the Doctor's claim on that head.—[So far De Quincey; but let not the reader trust to him too much in this matter. The evidence is overwhelming that Clarendon gave Gauden his bishopric after the Restoration because he believed Gauden to have been the author of the Eikon Basilike and dared not face Gauden's threats of revelations on the subject if promotion were refused him; and the evidence is conclusive, all Dr. Wordsworth's arguments notwithstanding, that Gauden was the real author of the book.—M.]
[107] The following is the passage to which De Quincey refers, as it now stands in Wordsworth's autobiographical poem The Prelude; which, though begun in 1799 and completed in 1805, was not published till 1850:—
"All shod with steel,
We hissed along the polished ice in games
Confederate, imitative of the chase
And woodland pleasures,—the resounding horn,
The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare.
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle; with the din
Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy not unnoticed, while the stars
Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the reflex of a star
That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed
Upon the glassy plain."
M.
[108] Wordsworth has told the story himself in his Prelude, thus:—
"Among the band of my compeers was one
Whom chance had stationed in the very room
Honoured by Milton's name. O temperate Bard!
Be it confest that, for the first time, seated
Within thy innocent lodge and oratory,
One of a festive circle, I poured out
Libations, to thy memory drank, till pride
And gratitude grew dizzy in a brain
Never excited by the fumes of wine
Before that hour, or since. Then, forth I ran
From the assembly; through a length of streets
Ran, ostrich-like, to reach our chapel door
In not a desperate or opprobrious time,
Albeit long after the importunate bell
Had stopped, with wearisome Cassandra voice
No longer haunting the dark winter night....
Call back, O Friend! a moment to thy mind
The place itself and fashion of the rites.
With careless ostentation shouldering up
My surplice, through the inferior throng I clove
Of the plain Burghers, who in audience stood
On the last skirts of their permitted ground,
Under the pealing organ."
M.