Biographical Essays

Biographical Essays, by Thomas
de Quincey

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Title: Biographical Essays
Author: Thomas de Quincey

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BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS ***

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DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS.
The "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," and "Suspiria De
Profundis," form the first volume of this series of Mr. De Quincey's
Writings. A third volume will shortly be issued, containing some of his
most interesting papers contributed to the English magazines.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS.
BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY,
Author of "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater," Etc. Etc.

SHAKSPEARE. [Endnote: 1]
William Shakspeare, the protagonist on the great arena of modern
poetry, and the glory of the human intellect, was born at

Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick, in the year 1564, and
upon some day, not precisely ascertained, in the month of April. It is
certain that he was baptized on the 25th; and from that fact, combined
with some shadow of a tradition, Malone has inferred that he was born
on the 23d. There is doubtless, on the one hand, no absolute necessity
deducible from law or custom, as either operated in those times, which
obliges us to adopt such a conclusion; for children might be baptized,
and were baptized, at various distances from their birth: yet, on the
other hand, the 23d is as likely to have been the day as any other; and
more likely than any earlier day, upon two arguments. First, because
there was probably a tradition floating in the seventeenth century, that
Shakspeare died upon his birthday: now it is beyond a doubt that he
died upon the 23d of April.
Secondly, because it is a reasonable presumption, that no parents,
living in a simple community, tenderly alive to the pieties of household
duty, and in an age still clinging reverentially to the ceremonial
ordinances of religion, would much delay the adoption of their child
into the great family of Christ. Considering the extreme frailty of an
infant's life during its two earliest years, to delay would often be to
disinherit the child of its Christian privileges; privileges not the less
eloquent to the feelings from being profoundly mysterious, and, in the
English church, forced not only upon the attention, but even upon the
eye of the most thoughtless. According to the discipline of the English
church, the unbaptized are buried with "maimed rites," shorn of their
obsequies, and sternly denied that "sweet and solemn farewell," by
which otherwise the church expresses her final charity with all men;
and not only so, but they are even locally separated and sequestrated.
Ground the most hallowed, and populous with Christian burials of
households,
"That died in peace with one another. Father, sister, son, and brother,"
opens to receive the vilest malefactor; by which the church
symbolically expresses her maternal willingness to gather back into her
fold those even of her flock who have strayed from her by the most
memorable aberrations; and yet, with all this indulgence, she banishes

to unhallowed ground the innocent bodies of the unbaptized. To them
and to suicides she turns a face of wrath. With this gloomy fact offered
to the very external senses, it is difficult to suppose that any parents
would risk their own reproaches, by putting the fulfilment of so grave a
duty on the hazard of a convulsion fit. The case of royal children is
different; their baptisms, it is true, were often delayed for weeks but the
household chaplains of the palace were always at hand, night and day,
to baptize them in the very agonies of death. [Endnote: