Memorials and Other Papers

Memorials and Other Papers

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Title: Memorials and Other Papers
Author: Thomas de Quincey
Release Date: July, 2004 [EBook #6171] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on November 21,
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Edition: 10
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK,
MEMORIALS AND OTHER PAPERS ***

Anne Soulard, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team.

MEMORIALS, AND OTHER PAPERS, VOL. I.
BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY

FROM THE AUTHOR, TO THE AMERICAN EDITOR OF HIS
WORKS.

These papers I am anxious to put into the hands of your house, and, so
far as regards the U.S., of your house exclusively; not with any view to
further emolument, but as an acknowledgment of the services which
you have already rendered me; namely, first, in having brought together
so widely scattered a collection--a difficulty which in my own hands by
too painful an experience I had found from nervous depression to be
absolutely insurmountable; secondly, in having made me a participator
in the pecuniary profits of the American edition, without solicitation or
the shadow of any expectation on my part, without any legal claim that
I could plead, or equitable warrant in established usage, solely and
merely upon your own spontaneous motion. Some of these new papers,
I hope, will not be without their value in the eyes of those who have
taken an interest in the original series. But at all events, good or bad,
they are now tendered to the appropriation of your individual house, the
Messrs. TICKNOR & FIELDS, according to the amplest extent of any
power to make such a transfer that I may be found to possess by law or
custom in America.
I wish this transfer were likely to be of more value. But the veriest trifle,
interpreted by the spirit in which I offer it, may express my sense of the
liberality manifested throughout this transaction by your honorable
house.
Ever believe me, my dear sir,

Your faithful and obliged,
THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

CONTENTS OF VOLUME I.

EXPLANATORY NOTICES THE ORPHAN HEIRESS. VISIT TO
LAXTON THE PRIORY OXFORD THE PAGAN ORACLES THE
REVOLUTION OF GREECE

EXPLANATORY NOTICES.

Many of the papers in my collected works were originally written under
one set of disadvantages, and are now revised under another. They were
written generally under great pressure as to time, in order to catch the
critical periods of monthly journals; written oftentimes at a distance
from the press (so as to have no opportunity for correction); and always
written at a distance from libraries, so that very many statements,
references, and citations, were made on the authority of my unassisted
memory. Under such circumstances were most of the papers composed;
and they are now reissued in a corrected form, sometimes even partially
recast, under the distraction of a nervous misery which embarrasses my
efforts in a mode and in a degree inexpressible by words. Such, indeed,
is the distress produced by this malady, that, if the present act of
republication had in any respect worn the character of an experiment, I
should have shrunk from it in despondency. But the experiment, so far
as there was any, had been already tried for me vicariously amongst the
Americans; a people so nearly repeating our own in style of intellect,
and in the composition of their reading class, that a success amongst
them counts for a success amongst ourselves. For some few of the
separate papers in these volumes I make pretensions of a higher cast.
These pretensions I will explain hereafter. All the rest I resign to the
reader's unbiased judgment, adding here, with respect to four of them, a
few prefatory words--not of propitiation or deprecation, but simply in
explanation as to points that would otherwise be open to
misconstruction.