Baillet… tom. I. p. 102–3: Adrien Baillet (1649–1706), La Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes, 2 vols. (Paris: Horthemels, 1691), i. 102–3. The incident appears almost exactly as Baillet recounts it.
Gluckstadt… Hamburg: Gluckstadt lies north-west of Hamburg on the River Elbe estuary in northern Germany.
East Friezland … West Friezland: ‘Friesland’, or ‘Frisia’, is a historic region of Germany and the Netherlands fronting the North Sea.
‘des scélérats’: ‘villains’.
quand il viendroit à manquer: ‘should he happen to go missing’.
‘funk,’ (as the men of Eton call it,): Eton College was founded by Henry VI in 1440, and is located in Berkshire, southern England. ‘Funk’ is ‘cowering fear’ (OED, which notes that ‘funk’ is ‘first mentioned as Oxford slang’).
‘game’: ‘showing “fight”; plucky, spirited’ (OED).
respectable trunk-maker to declare: the paper from unsold books was proverbially used for lining trunks.
Zuyder Zee: ‘Zuiderzee’, or ‘Southern Sea’, is a former inlet of the North Sea that penetrated into the central Netherlands. In 1927–32 it was dammed and most of the area reclaimed as farm land.
Flying Dutchman: in European maritime legend, the Flying Dutchman is a spectre ship doomed to sail for ever. Its appearance is believed to signal imminent disaster.
‘Caesarem vehis et fortunas ejus’: Plutarch, Parallel Lives, Caesar, xxxviii: ‘You carry Caesar and his fortunes’. The phrase was used by Caesar to identify himself to a boat captain who was anxious to turn back to port because of a storm.
German emperor: not identified.
Spinosa: Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77), Dutch-Jewish philosopher.
died in his bed: it is generally accepted that Spinoza died of tuberculosis.
La Via … Jean Colerus: Johannes Colerus (1647–1707), Lutheran minister in The Hague, The Life of Benedict de Spinosa (1705). De Quincey’s summary of Colerus is lively but accurate.
‘que sa mort … naturelle’: ‘that his death was not entirely natural’.
Rev. Mr Henry Teonge: Henry Teonge (1621–90), naval chaplain, kept a spirited diary of his sea travels from 1675 to 1679. De Quincey’s good friend Charles Knight (1791–1873) first edited and published the diary in 1825. De Quincey’s reference is to page four of Knight’s edition.
Fryer’s Travels to the East Indies, 1672: John Fryer (d. 1733), surgeon in the East India Company, A New Account of East India and Persia in Eight Letters: being nine years travels, begun in 1672 and finished in 1681 (1698).
Diapente … Diatessaron … Evangelical: literally, ‘harmony of five’ and ‘harmony of four’. ‘Evangelical’, De Quincey wittily suggests, because ‘diatessaron’ is also ‘a harmony of the four Gospels’ (OED).
‘extrêmement sobre en son boire et en son manger’: ‘a very abstemious eater and drinker’.
mandragora … and opium: ‘His Bill amounted to sixteen Florins and two pence.... there is no Opium nor Mandrake mentioned therein’ (John Colerus, ‘The Life of Benedict de Spinosa’, in Frederick Pollock, Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy (London, 1899), 416).
these two letters, L. M.: Colerus writes simply of the ‘Medicus L. M. Van Amsterdam’ (‘the physician L. M. from Amsterdam’; ‘The Life of Benedict de Spinosa’, p. 414).
ducatoon: ‘a silver coin formerly current in Italian and some other European states’ (OED).
Lindley Murray: Lindley Murray (1745–1826) was born in Pennsylvania but settled near York in England. He is best known for his Grammar of the English Language (1795).
Hebrew grammar: In 1670 Spinoza began to compose a Hebrew grammar, Compendium Grammatices Linguae Hebraeae, but did not finish it.
Hobbes: Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), English political philosopher.
irresistible power … highest species of right: in Leviathan (1651), Hobbes systemically set out an ingenious model for authoritarian government, and argued that the supremacy and unity of the sovereign power was the essential condition of a stable society, and to this even moral law must be subordinated.
1640 … little MS.... king’s behalf: Hobbes’s De Corpore Politico circulated in 1640 in manuscript form, and argued in favour of undivided sovereignty.
‘had not his Majesty … (in May) … danger of his life’: in April 1640 Charles I summoned parliament for the first time in eleven years. His requests for funds were blocked and he brought proceedings to an abrupt close in early May. De Quincey quotes from Hobbes’s ‘Considerations upon the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners, and Religion of Thomas Hobbes’, in Works of Hobbes, iv. 414.
Long Parliament: the Long Parliament was summoned by Charles I in November 1640 and not officially dissolved until 1660, following the English Civil Wars and the Protectorate. Hobbes feared he would be called to account for De Corpore Politico and fled to France.
John Dennis … Louis XIV… Queen Anne: John Dennis (1657–1734), critic and dramatist whose only successful play, Liberty Asserted (1704), contained bitter attacks on the French. His egotism approached mania. He is said to have believed that the French would not agree to the Peace of Utrecht that ended the War of the Spanish Succession unless he was handed over to them. The anecdote is recounted in Theophilus Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 5 vols. (London, 1753), iv. 221–2.
Cromwell… Leviathan: Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), leading general on the parliamentary side in the English Civil War, was lord protector from 1653 to 1658. In 1651 Hobbes published Leviathan and returned to England.
ambassadors at the Hague and Madrid: Isaac Dorislaus (1595–1649), diplomat and lawyer, was appointed the Commonwealth’s ambassador to the Dutch Republic, but was assassinated at The Hague by Royalists. Anthony Ascham (1618–50), parliamentarian, went to Madrid as an ambassador of the Commonwealth, and was murdered by Royalist henchmen.
Tum venit … terror ubique aderat: Hobbes, ‘Vita Carmine Expressa’, in Works of Hobbes, vol. i. p. xciii: ‘Then Dorislaus and Ascham came to mind for me | Just as the terror was present everywhere for the one proscribed (ordained for death)’.
‘terror ubique aderat!’: Hobbes has written what purports to be an elegiac couplet, but the second half of the second line is clumsily composed from a metrical point of view, especially in the elision of the syllables ‘que’ and ‘a’.
bounce: ‘a loud a audacious boast’ (OED).
Wallis the mathematician: Hobbes addressed his ‘Considerations upon the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners, and Religion of Thomas Hobbes’ to John Wallis (1616–1703), mathematician and Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford. On the title-page he described Wallis as ‘a learned person’ (Works of Hobbes, iv. 409).
‘because he would not trust… the French clergy’: Works of Hobbes, iv. 415.
Tom’s being brought to the stake for religion: Leviathan was widely condemned as cynical and irreligious.
Mr Coleridge … as good as manuscript: De Quincey is almost certainly paraphrasing Coleridge’s wry observation on his newspaper The Friend, in Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1983), i. 175: ‘To establish this distinction was one main object of THE FRIEND; if even in a biography of my own literary life I can with propriety refer to a work, which was printed rather than published, or so published that it had been well for the unfortunate author, if it had remained in manuscript!’
Tennison … Tillotson: Thomas Tenison (1636–1715) published The Creed of Mr Hobbes Examined in 1670. He succeeded John Tillotson (1630–94) as archbishop of Canterbury upon the latter’s death.
introductory anecdote is as follows: De Quincey quotes from Tenison, ‘The Introduction’ in The Creed of Mr Hobbes Examined (London, 1670), 2–5.
Peak in Derbyshire … Hobbes’s description of it: Hobbes extolled the splendour of the Peak District in a Latin poem, De Mirabililus Pecci (1636).
Chattsworth: Hobbes was for many years tutor to the young Earls of Devonshire. The fa
mily’s country seat is Chatsworth House in Derbyshire.
same water with Leviathan: Hobbes took the title Leviathan from the description of the sea monster in Job 41. The title suggests the kind of power he believed was necessary to create a civil society.
Deipnosophilae: the printer has spelled the title incorrectly. It should be Deipnosophitae (The Gastronomers), an aristocratic symposium on food and other subjects by Athenaeus (fl. c. AD 200). De Quincey himself noted the spelling error in his ‘Letter to the Editor of Blackwood’s Magazine’ (see above, p. 160).
Sextus Roscius … murthered … Balneae Palatinae: Cicero, Pro Roscio Amerino, vii: ‘the father, while returning one evening from supper, was killed near the baths of Pallacina’.
Epicurus the Atheist… Death and the Gods: Cicero, De Natura Deorum, I. xxxi.
‘frightened from his propriety’: adapted from Shakespeare, Othello, II. iii. 175–6: ‘it frights the isle | From her propriety’.
Malebranche: Nicolas Malebranche (1638— 1715), French Roman Catholic priest and philosopher.
Bishop Berkeley: George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish Anglican bishop, scientist, and philosopher. He is reported to have visited Malebranche in Paris in 1713. De Quincey draws this anecdote from Joseph Stock (1740–1813), Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, An Account of the Life of George Berkeley (London, 1776), 9: Berkeley found Malebranche ‘in his cell, cooking in a small pipkin a medicine for a disorder with which he was then troubled. . . . The conversation naturally turned on our author’s system, of which the other had received some knowledge from a translation just published. But the issue of this debate proved tragical to poor Malebranche. — In the heat of disputation he raised his voice so high, and gave way so freely to the natural impetuosity of a man of parts and a Frenchman, that he brought on himself a violent increase of his disorder, which carried him off a few days after.’
genus irritabile: Horace, Epistles, II. ii. 102: ‘Much do I endure, to soothe the fretful tribe of bards’.
So the whole ear of Denmark is abused: Shakespeare, Hamlet, I. v. 36–8: ‘so the whole ear of Denmark | Is by a forged process of my death | Rankly abus’d’.
‘every virtue under heaven’: Alexander Pope (1688–1744), ‘Epilogue to the Satires: Dialogue II’, l. 73.
turn-up: ‘a boxing contest’ (OED).
Occasional Causes: ‘Occasionalism’ asserts that the relations between human minds and physical things, which we intuitively suppose to be causal, are in fact a consequence of God’s will. Malebranche played a central role in developing the theory.
Leibnitz: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646— 1716), German mathematician and philosopher.
a fortiori: with greater reason or more convincing force.
gold … Vienna … his throat: De Quincey blends fact and fiction. Leibniz was accused of miserliness and he left a substantial sum for his heirs, but he died peacefully in his bed in Hanover after a week of confinement with gout and colic.
Dr Parr: Samuel Parr (1747–1825), clergyman, schoolmaster, Whig commentator, and disputatious scholar. Parr was born at Harrow-on-the-Hill near London, but in 1783 he became the perpetual curate at Hatton in Warwickshire. The village lay on the road from Warwick to Birmingham. De Quincey met Parr in the summer of 1812, and produced a four-part assessment of his career in Blackwood’s for 1831.
salus reipublicae: ‘the safety of the republic’.
2¼ Spital sermons: Parr delivered his Spital sermon on 15 April 1800, and published it later that same year. De Quincey had a low opinion of Parr’s Whiggery.
anonymous life of this very great man: untraced.
Königsberg: Kant was born, spent his entire life, and died in Königsberg in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia).
little child … Kant escaped: De Quincey seems to draw this incident at least in part from an account of an 1819 English murder that he published when he was editor of the Westmorland Gazette. See Robert H. Super, ‘De Quincey and a Murderer’s Conscience’, Times Literary Supplement (5 December 1936), 1016: the murderer Robert Dean ‘first thought of murdering Miss Longman, but considering that she might have some sins to answer for he determined upon killing the innocent child; and he accordingly took the poor infant out, and cut her throat’.
Edmondbury Godfrey: Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (1621–78), English magistrate, was murdered, allegedly by Roman Catholics. The incident set off a wave of anti-Catholic hysteria, and shook the government of Charles II. A Catholic silversmith confessed that he had witnessed the event, but later admitted that he had lied. The murder has never been satisfactorily explained. James Joyce noted that ‘the murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey’ was ‘so artistically secret that it evoked the admiration of De Quincey’ (James Joyce: Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford, 2000), 84).
Sint Maecenates, non deerunt, Flacce, Marones: Martial (c. AD 41—c.103), Epigrams, VIII. lvi. 5: ‘Let there be many a Maecenas, many a Maro, Flaccus, will not fail, and even your fields will give you a Virgil’. Gaius Maecenas (c.74–8 BC), statesman and trusted adviser to Augustus, was the munificent patron of several Roman literary figures, including Virgil (70–19 BC), eminent poet.
Consulting Grant’s … about 4 three-tenths per annum: John Graunt (1620— 74), statistician and generally accepted as the founder of the science of demography, Natural and Political Observations … made upon the Bills of Mortality, ed. Walter Willcox (Baltimore, 1939), 35: ‘That but few are Murthered, viz., not above 86’ of the 229,250 who have ‘died of other diseases, and casualties’.
Mrs Ruscombe: Frances Ruscombe and her maid Mary Sweet were murdered on 27 September 1764. The assassin carried away £90 in gold coin and was never brought to justice, though several suspects were arrested. For details see John Casberd, A Vindication of Peaceable Robert Matthews, from the Charge of Mrs Ruscombe’s Murder (Bristol, 1781); and John Latimer, The Annals of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century (Bristol, 1893), 362–3.
George III: George III (1738–1820), king of Great Britain and Ireland, 1760–1820.
College Green: the area immediately in front of Bristol Cathedral.
surgeon … assisted at his dissection: Charles White (1728–1813), Manchester surgeon and family physician to the Quincey family during De Quincey’s childhood, had a private museum in which he housed the skeleton of an executed highwayman. White and others had helped to dissect the body shortly after the execution. De Quincey believed the highwayman was also very probably responsible for the Bristol murders. White gave De Quincey a tour of his museum on at least two occasions.
Cruickshank: William Cumberland Cruickshank (1745–1800), anatomist.
coup de grace: death blow.
Bland: De Quincey means Mary Blandy (1720–52), who murdered her father with poison. Cf. ‘Mary Blandy’ in Newgate Calendar, iii. 219–20: ‘Miss Blandy conveyed some of the powder and gave it to her father; and repeating this draught on the following day, he was tormented with the most violent pains in his bowels’. For more details, see the Trial of Mary Blandy, ed. William Roughead (London, 1914).
Donnellan … Boughton: John Donellan (d. 1781) was executed at Warwick after being convicted of using poison to murder his brother-in-law Sir Theodosius Edward Allesley Boughton (1760–80). Cf. ‘John Donellan’ in Newgate Calendar, iv. 151: ‘Dr Rattray, of Coventry … was of opinion, from the symptoms that followed the taking of the draught, that it was poison, and the certain cause of … death’.
Italy?: Italy was thought of as a place where the use of poisons was particularly prevalent, in part because of the notorious Borgia family, powerful in political and ecclesiastical circles in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and rumoured to be highly adept at using poison to dispatch enemies.
On Murder (Oxford World's Classics) Page 27