30 17 FEY: This is not a Celtic word; it is the Anglo-Saxon _faege_
retained in Lowland Scotch, which is the most northerly English
dialect. The word appears frequently in descriptions of battles, the
Anglo-Saxon fatalistic philosophy teaching that, certain warriors
entered the conflict _faege_, "doomed." Now the meaning is altered
slightly: "You are surely fey," would be said in Scotland, as Professor
Masson remarks, to a person observed to be in extravagantly high
spirits, or in any mood surprisingly beyond the bounds of his ordinary
temperament,--the notion being that the excitement is supernatural, and
a presage of his approaching death, or of some other calamity about to
befall him.
31 27 THE INSPIRATION OF GOD, ETC.: This is an indication--more
interesting than agreeable, perhaps--of the heights to which the
martial ardor of De Quincey's toryism rises.
33 13 CAESAR THE DICTATOR, AT HIS LAST DINNER-PARTY, ETC.: related by
Suetonius in his life of Julius Caesar, Chap. LXXXVII: "The day before
he died, some discourse occurring at dinner in M. Lepidus' house upon
that subject, which was the most agreeable way of dying, he expressed
his preference for what is sudden and unexpected" (repentinum
inopinatumque praetulerat). The story is told by Plutarch and Appian
also.
35 13 _BIATHANATOS_: "De Quincey has evidently taken this from John
Donne's treatise: _BIATHANATOS, A Declaration of that Paradoxe or
Thesis, That Self-homicide is not so naturally Sin, that it may never
be otherwise_, 1644.
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