20 3 TURRETS: "Tourettes fyled rounde" appears in Chaucer's Knight's Tale, 1. 1294, where it means the ring on a dog's collar through which the leash was passed. Skeat explains torets as "probably eyes in which rings will turn round, because each eye is a little larger than the thickness of the ring." Cf. Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe, Part I, sec. 2, "This ring renneth in a maner turet," "this ring runs in a kind of eye." But Chaucer does not refer to harness.
21 2 MR. WATERTON TELLS ME: Charles Waterton, the naturalist, was born in 1782 and died in 1865. His Wanderings in South America was published in 1825.
23 11 EARTH AND HER CHILDREN: This paragraph is about one fifth of the length of the corresponding paragraph as it appeared in Blackwood. For the longer version see Masson's ed., Vol. XIII, p. 289, note 2.
24 14 THE GENERAL POST-OFFICE: The present office was opened Sept. 23, 1829. St. Martin's-le-Grand is a church within the "city" of London, so named to distinguish it from St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, which faces what is now Trafalgar Square, and is, as the name indicates, outside the "city." The street takes its name from the church.
28 10 BARNET is a Hertfordshire village, eleven miles north of London.
29 33 A "COURIER" EVENING PAPER, CONTAINING THE GAZETTE: A gazette was originally one of the three official papers of the kingdom; afterwards any official announcement, as this of a great victory.
30 17 FEY: This is not a Celtic word; it is the Anglo-Saxon faege retained in Lowland Scotch, which is the most northerly English dialect. The word appears frequently in descriptions of battles, the Anglo-Saxon fatalistic philosophy teaching that, certain warriors entered the conflict faege, "doomed." Now the meaning is altered slightly: "You are surely fey," would be said in Scotland, as Professor Masson remarks, to a person observed to be in extravagantly high spirits, or in any mood surprisingly beyond the bounds of his ordinary temperament,—the notion being that the excitement is supernatural, and a presage of his approaching death, or of some other calamity about to befall him.
31 27 THE INSPIRATION OF GOD, ETC.: This is an indication—more interesting than agreeable, perhaps—of the heights to which the martial ardor of De Quincey's toryism rises.
33 13 CÆSAR THE DICTATOR, AT HIS LAST DINNER-PARTY, ETC.: related by Suetonius in his life of Julius Cæsar, Chap. LXXXVII: "The day before he died, some discourse occurring at dinner in M. Lepidus' house upon that subject, which was the most agreeable way of dying, he expressed his preference for what is sudden and unexpected" (repentinum inopinatumque praetulerat). The story is told by Plutarch and Appian also.
35 13 BIATHANATOS: "De Quincey has evidently taken this from John Donne's treatise: BIATHANATOS, A Declaration of that Paradoxe or Thesis, That Self-homicide is not so naturally Sin, that it may never be otherwise, 1644. See his paper on Suicide, etc., Masson's ed., VIII, 398 [Riverside, IX, 209]. But not even Donne's precedent justifies the word formation. The only acknowledged compounds are biaio-thanasia, 'violent death,' and biaio-thanatos, 'dying a violent death.' Even bia thanatos, 'death by violence,' is not classical."—HART. But the form biathanatos is older than Donne and is said to be common in MSS. It should be further remarked that neither of the two compounds cited is classical. As to De Quincey's interpretation of Cæsar's meaning here, cf. Merivale's History of the Romans under the Empire, Chap. XXI, where he translates Cæsar's famous reply: "That which is least expected." Cf. also Shakespeare, Julius Cæsar, Act II, sc. ii, 1. 33.