The Works of Thomas De Quincey
The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Confessions of an English opium eater Thomas De Quincey,
Publisher: General Books LLC
ISBN: 0217617530
Edition: Paperback; 2009-08-16
Summary:
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incidental notices, is—that this, beyond all other forms ol domestic
authority, furnished to wholesale rapine and peculation their very
amplest arena. The relation of father and son, as was that of patron
and client, were generally, in the practice of life, cherished with
religious fidelity: whereas the solemn duties of the tutor (i. e.,
the guardian) to his ward, which had their very root and origin in
the tenderest adjurations of a dying friend, though subsequently
refreshed by the hourly spectacle of helpless orphanage playing round
the margins of pitfalls hidden by flowers, spoke but seldom to the
sensibilities of a Koman through any language of oracular power. Few
indeed, if any, were the obligations in a proper sense moral which
pressed upon the Roman. The main fountains of moral obligation had in
Rome, by law or by custom, been thoroughly poisoned. Marriage had
corrupted itself through the facility of divorce,. and through the
consequences of that facility (viz., levity in choosing, and
fickleness in adhering to the choice), into so exquisite a traffic of
selfishness, that it could not yield so much as a phantom model of
sanctity. The relation of Lusband and wife had, for all moral
impressions, perished amongst the Romans. The relation of father and
child had all its capacities of holy tenderness crushed out of it
under the fierce pressure of penal and vindictive enforcements. The
duties of the client to his patron stood upon no basis of simple
gratitude or simple fidelity (corresponding to the feudal fealty),
but upon a basis of prudential terror; terror from positive law, or
from social opinion. From the first intermeddling of law with the
movement of the higher moral affections, there is an end to freedom
in the act—to purity in the motive—to dignity in the personal rela...
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