Томас де Квинси
Miscellaneous Essays
NOTES
[NOTE 1
"In procinct."—Milton's translation (somewhere in The Paradise Regained) of the technical phrase "in procinctu."]
[NOTE 2
"Geologists know not."—Observe, reader, we are not at all questioning the Scriptural Chronology of the earth as a habitation for man, for on the pre-human earth Scripture is silent: not upon the six thousand years does our doubt revolve, but upon a very different thing, viz. to what age in man these six thousand years correspond by analogy in a planet. In man the sixtieth part is a very venerable age. But as to a planet, as to our little earth, instead of arguing dotage, six thousand years may have scarcely carried her beyond babyhood. Some people think she is cutting her first teeth; some think her in her teens. But, seriously, it is a very interesting problem. Do the sixty centuries of our earth imply youth, maturity, or dotage?]
[NOTE 3
"Everywhere the ancients went to bed, like good boys, from seven to nine o'clock."—As we are perfectly serious, we must beg the reader, who fancies any joke in all this, to consider what an immense difference it must have made to the earth, considered as a steward of her own resources-whether great nations, in a period when their resources were so feebly developed, did, or did not, for many centuries, require candles; and, we may add, fire. The five heads of human expenditure are,—1, Food; 2, Shelter; 3, Clothing; 4, Fuel; 5, Light. All were pitched on a lower scale in the Pagan era; and the two last were almost banished from ancient housekeeping. What a great relief this must have been to our good mother the earth! who, at first, was obliged to request of her children that they would settle round the Mediterranean. She could not even afford them water, unless they would come and fetch it themselves out of a common tank or cistern.]
[NOTE 4
"The manesalutantes."—There can be no doubt that the levees of modern princes and ministers have been inherited from this ancient usage of Rome; one which belonged to Rome republican, as well as Rome imperial. The fiction in our modern practice is—that we wait upon the levé, or rising of the prince. In France, at one era, this fiction was realized: the courtiers did really attend the king's dressing. And, as to the queen, even up to the revolution, Marie Antoinette almost from necessity gave audience at her toilette.]
[NOTE 5
"Or again, 'siccum pro biscodo, ut hodie vocamus, sumemus?'"—It is odd enough that a scholar so complete as Salmasius, whom nothing ever escapes, should have overlooked so obvious an alternative as that of siccus, meaning without opsonium—Scoticè, without "kitchen."]
[NOTE 6
"The whole amount of relief;"—from which it appears how grossly Locke (see his Education) was deceived in fancying that Augustus practised any remarkable abstinence in taking only a bit of bread and a raisin or two, by way of luncheon. Augustus did no more than most people did; secondly, he abstained only with a view to dinner; and, thirdly, for this dinner he never waited longer than up to four o'clock.]
[NOTE 7
"Mansiones"—the halts of the Roman legions, the stationary places of repose which divided the marches, were so called.]
[NOTE 8
"The everlasting Jew;"—the German name for what we English call the Wandering Jew. The German imagination has been most struck with the duration of the man's life, and his unhappy sanctity from death; the English by the unrestingness of the man's life, his incapacity of repose.]
[NOTE 9
"Immeasurable toga."—It is very true that in the time of Augustus the toga had disappeared amongst the lowest plebs, and greatly Augustus was shocked at that spectacle. It is a very curious fact in itself, especially as expounding the main cause of the civil wars. Mere poverty, and the absence of bribery from Rome, whilst all popular competition for offices drooped, can alone explain this remarkable revolution of dress.]
[NOTE 10
That boys in the Prætexta did not bathe in the public baths, is certain; and most unquestionably that is the meaning of the expression in Juvenal so much disputed—"Nisi qui nondum ære lavantur." By æs he means the ahenum, a common name for the public bath, which was made of copper; in our navy, "the coppers" is a name for the boilers. "Nobody believes in such tales except children," is the meaning. This one exclusion cut off three eighths of the Roman males.]
[NOTE 11
"His young—English bride."—The case of an old man, or one reputed old, marrying a very girlish wife, is always too much for the gravity of history; and, rather than lose the joke, the historian prudently disguises the age, which, after all, was little above fifty. And the very persons who insist on the late dinner as the proximate cause of death, elsewhere insinuate something else, not so decorously expressed. It is odd that this amiable prince, so memorable as having been a martyr to late dining at eleven, A.M., was the same person who is so equally memorable for the noble answer about a King of France not remembering the wrongs of a Duke of Orleans.]
[NOTE 12
"Took their coena at noon."—And, by the way, in order to show how little coena had to do with any evening hour (though, in any age but that of our fathers, four in the afternoon would never have been thought an evening hour in the sense implied by supper,)—the Roman gourmands and bons vivants continued through the very last ages of Rome to take their coena, when more than usually sumptuous, at noon. This, indeed, all people did occasionally, just as we sometimes give a dinner even now so early as four, P.M., under the name of a dejeuner à la fourchette. Those who took their coena so early as this, were said de die coenare—to begin dining from high day. Just as the line in Horace—"Ut jugulent homines surgunt de nocte latrones," does not mean that the robbers rise when others are going to bed, viz., at nightfall, but at midnight. For, says one of the three best scholars of this earth, de die, de nocte, mean from that hour which was most fully, most intensely day or night, viz., the centre, the meridian. This one fact is surely a clencher as to the question whether coena meant dinner or supper.]
