'A Life in Levities'

DE QUINCEY ON GROTIUS

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The English essayist Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) is best known for his autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821; revised 1856), and for his Reminiscences (1834-39) of his early idolization and subsequent alienation from the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Col- eridge. But De Quincey in fact produced an enormous body of writing, much of it for the leading British journals, and on topics that ranged from aesthetics and economics to classical scholarship, literary criticism, history, philosophy, politics, and science. Across this wide spectrum he often engaged with the intellectual legacy of Hugo Grotius, though his attitude was decidedly mixed. Sometimes Grotius was praised but, more characteris- tically, De Q!1incey mocked or denigrated him. The flamboyance demanded by the magazine context often led De Quincey to attempt to bolster his own intellectual pretensions by maligning others. At the same time, his truculent nationalism frequently meant that he championed English thinkers whilst willfully undervaluing their eminent European counterparts. De Quincey on occasion spoke enthusiastically of Grotius. As a young boy, Grotius's 'metrical translations into Latin of various fragments surviv- ing from the Greek scenical poets ... struck [him] as exceedingly beautiful." In his 1830 essay on the Cambridge scholar Richard Bentley he describes Grotius as one of 'the very heroes of classical literature for the preceding 150 years'.2 A year later in his examination of the Whig cleric Samuel Parr he recommended to Parr 'the spirit of a maxim' which Parr himself 'sometimes

I The Works of Thomas De QJtincey, Volume 2, ed. Greve! Lindop (London: Pickering and Charto 2000), p. 130 (hereafter, DQW, vol. 2). 2 The Works of Thomas De Quincey, Volume 7, ed. Robert Morrison (London: Pickering and Charto 2000), p. 136 (hereafter, DQW, vol. 7)·

159 quoted from Grotius - that he so loved peace, as not to sacrifice the truth"3 presumably in reference to Book III, Chapter I of De iure belli ac pacis, where Grotius discusses truthfulness as being required even towards enemies. But more frequently De Quincey disparaged Grotius. As a teenage stu- dent at Manchester Grammar School he was for a short while given the task on Sunday evenings of producing 'an off-hand translation' from Grotius's De Veritate Religionis Christianae, a book he later characterized as in 'every wayan attorney-like piece of special pleading' that was logically inferior to the works of English writers like Nathaniel Lardner (1684-1768) and Wil- liam Paley (1743-18°5).4 Particularly offensive, according to De Quincey, was Grocius's 'ridiculous fable of Mahomet's Dove', which the Oxford pro- fessor Edward Pococke 'denounced' in his 1660 Arabic translation.5 De Quincey described Grotius's Excerpta ex Tragoediis et Comediis Graecis as a piece of 'imperfect scholarship', and considered his Annales et Historiae de Rebus Belgicis as 'without historical merit'.5 On at least two occasions he quoted the minor English poet John Hookham Frere's 'Elegy on the Death of Jean Bon St Andre' (1798), a burlesque in which the Dey of Tunis informs the French Consul that he will have his head cut off. In response,

The Consul quoted Wickefort, And Puffendorf, and Grotius, And proved from Vattell Exceedingly well, Such a deed must be quite atrocious.6

De Quincey, however, saved his most damning words for De iure belli ac pacis. In 1830 he acknowledged that 'two centuries ago - that is to say, soon after the publication of his De Jure Belli et Pacis (in the summer of 1625)- his name was unquestionably the highest literary name in Europe', and he singled out in particular the praise of the English historian and divine Gil- bert Burnet (1643-1715; DNB), who in 1710 described De iure as 'now all

3 The Works of Thomas De Quincey, Volume 8, ed. Robert Morrison (London: Pickering and Chatto 2001), p. 95 (hereafter, DQW, vol. 8). 4 DQW, vol. 2, p. 130; DQW, vol. 7, p. 67; cf. Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1802, who con- demned De Veritate for its 'judicial, law-cant kind of evidence for Christianity' (The Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (1956-71), vol. II, p. 861). 5 DQW, vol. 7, p. 67· 6 The Works of Thomas De Quincey, Volume 4, ed. Frederick Burwick (London: Pickering and Chatto 2000), p. 182; DQW, vol. 7, p. 68.

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