Suspiria de Profundis by Thomas De Quincey

Author:Thomas De Quincey
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: English essays
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2016-10-27T20:04:39+00:00

He answered to the con­di­tions in every one of the items:—1, a mon­ster he was; 2, dread­ful; 3, shape­less; 4, huge; 5, who had lost an eye. But why should that de­light me? Had he been one of the Cal­en­dars in the Ar­a­bian Nights, and had paid down his eye as the price of his crim­inal curi­os­ity, what right had I to ex­ult in his mis­for­tune? I did not ex­ult; I de­lighted in no man’s pun­ish­ment, though it were even mer­ited. But these per­sonal dis­tinc­tions (Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) iden­ti­fied in an in­stant an old friend of mine whom I had known in the south for some years as the most mas­terly of mail-coach­men. He was the man in all Europe that could (if any could) have driven six-in-hand full gal­lop over Al Sirat—that dread­ful bridge of Maho­met, with no side bat­tle­ments, and of ex­tra room not enough for a razor’s edge—lead­ing right across the bot­tom­less gulf. Under this em­in­ent man, whom in Greek I cognom­in­ated Cyc­lops Diphrélates (Cyc­lops the Chari­oteer), I, and oth­ers known to me, stud­ied the diphrelatic art. Ex­cuse, reader, a word too el­eg­ant to be pedantic. As a pu­pil, though I paid ex­tra fees, it is to be lamen­ted that I did not stand high in his es­teem. It showed his dogged hon­esty (though, ob­serve, not his dis­cern­ment) that he could not see my mer­its. Let us ex­cuse his ab­surdity in this par­tic­u­lar by re­mem­ber­ing his want of an eye. Doubt­less that made him blind to my mer­its. In the art of con­ver­sa­tion, how­ever, he ad­mit­ted that I had the whip-hand of him. On the present oc­ca­sion great joy was at our meet­ing. But what was Cyc­lops do­ing here? Had the med­ical men re­com­men­ded north­ern air, or how? I col­lec­ted, from such ex­plan­a­tions as he vo­lun­teered, that he had an in­terest at stake in some suit-at-law now pending at Lan­caster; so that prob­ably he had got him­self trans­ferred to this sta­tion for the pur­pose of con­nect­ing with his pro­fes­sional pur­suits an in­stant read­i­ness for the calls of his law­suit.

Mean­time, what are we stop­ping for? Surely we have now waited long enough. Oh, this pro­cras­tin­at­ing mail, and this pro­cras­tin­at­ing post-of­fice! Can’t they take a les­son upon that sub­ject from me? Some people have called me pro­cras­tin­at­ing. Yet you are wit­ness, reader, that I was here kept wait­ing for the post-of­fice. Will the post-of­fice lay its hand on its heart, in its mo­ments of sobri­ety, and as­sert that ever it waited for me? What are they about? The guard tells me that there is a large ex­tra ac­cu­mu­la­tion of for­eign mails this night, ow­ing to ir­reg­u­lar­it­ies caused by war, by wind, by weather, in the packet ser­vice, which as yet does not be­ne­fit at all by steam. For an ex­tra hour, it seems, the post-of­fice has been en­gaged in thresh­ing out the pure wheaten cor­res­pond­ence of Glas­gow, and win­now­ing it from the chaff of all baser in­ter­me­di­ate towns. But at last all is fin­ished. Sound your

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