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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: DEM-DIO |
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DEPUTY (through the Fr. from a Late Lat. use of deputare, to cut off, allot; putare having the original sense of to trim, prune) , one appointed to act or govern instead of another; one who exercises an office in another man's right, a substitute; in representative government a member of an elected chamber. In general, the powers and duties of a deputy are those of his principal (see also REPRESENTATION), but the extent to which he may exercise them is dependent upon the power delegated to him. He may be authorized to exercise the whole of his principal's office, in which case he is a general deputy, or to act only in some particular matter or service, when he is termed a special deputy. In the United Kingdom various officials are specifically empowered by statute to appoint deputies to act for them under certain circumstances. Thus a clerk of the peace, in case of illness, incapacity or absence, may. appoint a fit person to act as his deputy. While judges of the supreme court cannot act by deputy, county court judges and recorders can, in cases of illnessor unavoidable absence, appoint deputies. So can registrars of county courts and returning officers at elections. DE QUINCEY, THOMAS (1785-18J9), English author, was born at Greenheys, Manchester, on the 15th of August 1785. He was the fifth child in a family of eight (four sons and four daughters) His father, descended from a Norman family, was a merchant, who left his wife and six children a clear income of 1600 a year. Thomas was from infancy a shy, sensitive child, with a constitutional tendency to dreaming by night and by day; and, under the influence of an elder brother, a lad " whose genius for mischief amounted to inspiration," who died in his sixteenth year, he spent much of his boyhood in imaginary worlds of their own creating. The amusements and occupations of the whole family, indeed, seem to have been mainly intellectual; and in De Quincey's case, emphatically, " the child was father to the man." " My life has been," he affirms in the Confessions, " on the whole the life of a philosopher; from my birth I was made an intellectual creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been." From boyhood he was more or less in contact with a polished circle; his education, easy to one of such native aptitude, was sedulously attended to. When he was in his twelfth year the family removed to Bath, where he was sent to the grammar school, at which he remained for about two years; and for a year more he attended another public school at Winkfield, Wiltshire. At thirteen he wrote Greek with ease; at fifteen he not only composed Greek verses in lyric measures, but could converse in Greek fluently and without embarrassment; one of his masters said of him, " that boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one." Towards the close of his fifteenth year he visited Ireland, with a companion of his own age, Lord Westport, the son of Lord Altamont, an Irish peer, and spent there in residence and travel some months of the summer and autumn of the year 1800,- being a spectator at Dublin of " the final ratification of the bill which united Ireland to Great Britain." On his return to England, his mother having now settled at St John's Priory, a residence near Chester, De Quincey was sent to the Manchester grammar school, mainly in the hope of securing one of the school exhibitions to help his expenses at Oxford. Discontented with the mode in which his guardians conducted his education, and with some view apparently of forcing them to send him earlier to college, he left this school after less than a year's residenceran away, in short, to his mother's house. There his mother's brother, Colonel Thomas Penson, made an arrangement for him to have a weekly allowance, on which he might reside at some country place in Wales, and pursue his studies, presumably till he could go to college. From Wales, however, after brief trial, " suffering grievously from want of books," he went off as he had done from school, and hid himself from guardians and friends in the world of London. And now, as he says, commenced " that episode, or impassioned parenthesis of my life, which is comprehended in The Confessions of an English Opium Eater." This London episode extended over a year or more; his money soon vanished, and he was in the utmost poverty; he obtained shelter for the night in Greek Street, Soho, from a moneylender's agent, and spent his days wandering in the streets and parks; finally the lad was reconciled to his guardians, and in 1803 was sent to Worcester College, Oxford, being by this time about nineteen. It was in the course of his second year at Oxford that he first tasted opium,having taken it to allay neuralgic pains. De Quincey's mother had settled at Weston Lea, near Bath, and on one of his visits to Bath, De Quincey made the acquaintance of Coleridge; he took Mrs Coleridge to Grasmere, where he became personally acquainted with Wordsworth. After finishing his career of five years at college in 18o8 he kept terms at the Middle Temple; but in 1809 visited the Wordsworths at Grasmere, and in the autumn returned to Dove Cottage, which he had taken on a lease. His choice was of course influenced partly by neighbourhood to Wordsworth, whom he early appreciated; having been, he says, the only man in all Europe who quoted Wordsworth so early as 18oz. His friendship with Wordsworth decreased within a few years, and when in 1834 De Quincey published in Tait's Magazine his reminiscences of the Grasmere circle, the indiscreet references to the Wordsworths contained in the article led to a complete cessation of intercourse. Here also he enjoyed the society and friendship of Coleridge, Southey and especially of Professor Wilson, as in London he had of Charles Lamb and his circle. He continued his classical and other studies, especially exploring the at that time almost unknown region of German literature, and indicating its riches to English readers. Here also, in 1816, he married Margaret Simpson, the " dear M " of whom a charming glimpse is accorded to the reader of the Confessions; his family came to be five sons and three daughters. For about a year and a half he edited the Westmoreland Gazette. He left Grasmere for London in .the early part of 182o. The Lambs received him with great kindness and introduced him to the proprietors of the London Magazine. It was in this journal in 1821 that the Confessions appeared. De Quincey also contributed to Blackwood, to Knight's Quarterly Magazine, and later to Tait's Magazine. His connexion with Blackwood took him to Edinburgh in 1828, and he lived there for twelve years, contributing from time to time to the Edinburgh Literary Gazette. His wife died in 1837, and the family eventually settled at Lasswade, but from this time De Quincey spent his time in lodgings in various places, staying at one place until the accumulation of papers filled the rooms, when he left them in charge of the landlady and wandered elsewhere. After his wife's death he gave way for the fourth time in his life to the opium habit, but in 1844 he reduced his daily quantity by a tremendous effort to six grains, and never again yielded. He died in Edinburgh on the 8th of December 1859, and is buried in the West Churchyard. During nearly fifty years De Quincey lived mainly by his pen. His patrimony seems never to have been entirely exhausted, and his habits and tastes were simple and inexpensive; but he was reckless in the use of money, and had debts and pecuniary difficulties of all sorts. There was, indeed, his associates affirm, an element of romance even in his impecuniosity, as there was in everything about him; and the diplomatic and other devices by which he contrived to keep clear of clamant creditors, while scrupulously fulfilling many obligations, often disarmed animosity, and converted annoyance into amusement. The famous Confessions of an English Opium Eater was published in a small volume in 1822, and attracted a very remarkable degree of attention, not simply by its personal disclosures, but by the extraordinary power of its dream-painting. No other literary man of his time, it has been remarked, achieved so high and universal a reputation from such merely fugitive efforts. The only works published separately (not in periodicals
Economy
De Quincey fully defined his own position and claim to distinction in the preface to his collected works. These he divides into three classes:" first, that class which proposes primarily to amuse the reader," such as the Narratives, Autobiographic Sketches, &c.; " second, papers which address themselves purely to the understanding as an insulated faculty, or do so primarily," such as the essays on Essenism, the Caesars, Cicero, &c.; and finally, as a third class, " and, in virtue of their aim, as a far higher class of compositions," he ranks those " modes of impassioned prose ranging under no precedents that I am aware of in any literature," such as the Confessions and Suspiria de Profundis. The high claim here asserted has been questioned; and short and isolated examples of eloquent apostrophe, and highly wrought imaginative description, have been cited from Rousseau and other masters of style; but De Quincey's power of sustaining a fascinating and elevated strain of " impassioned prose " is allowed to be entirely his own. Nor, in regard to his writings as a whole, will a minor general claim which he makes be disallowed, namely, that he " does not write without a thoughtful consideration of his subject," and also with novelty and freshness of view. " Generally," he says, " I claim (not arrogantly, but with firmness) the merit of rectification applied to absolute errors, or to injurious limitations of the truth." Another obvious quality of all his genius is its overflowing fulness of allusion and illustration
angel
economy
earnest student, and projected, if he did not so far proceed with, an elaborate and systematic treatise on the science, of which all that appears, however, are his fragmentary Dialogues on the system of Ricardo, published in the London Magazine in 1824, and The Logic of Political Economy (1844). But politicaland economic problems largely exercised his thoughts, and his historical sketches show that he is constantly alive to their interpenetrating influence. The same may be said of his biographies, notably of his remarkable sketch of Dr Parr. Neither politics nor economics, however, exercised an absorbing influence on his mind,they were simply provinces in the vast domain of universal speculation through which he ranged " with unconfined wings." How wide and varied was the region he traversed a glance at the titles of the papers which make up his collectedor more properly, selectedworks (for there was much matter of evanescent interest
To the appreciation of De Quincey the reader must bring an imaginative faculty somewhat akin to his owna certain general culture, and large knowledge of books, and men and things. Otherwise much of that slight and delicate allusion that gives point and colour and charm to his writings will be missed; and on this account the full enjoyment and comprehension of De Quincey must always remain a luxury of the literary and intellectual. But his skill in narration, his rare pathos, his wide sympathies, the pomp of his dream-descriptions, the exquisite playfulness of his lighter dissertations, and his abounding though delicate and subtle humour, commend him to a larger class. Though far from being a professed humorista character he would have shrunk fromthere is no more expert worker in a sort of half-veiled and elaborate humour and irony than De Quincey; but he employs those resources for the most part secondarily. Only in one instance has he given himself up to them unreservedly and of set purpose, namely, in the famous " Essay on Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts," published in Blackwood,an effort which, admired and admirable though it be, is also, it must be allowed, somewhat strained. His style, full and flexible, pure and polished, is peculiarly his own; yet it is not the style of a mannerist,its charm is, so to speak, latent; the form never obtrudes; the secret is only discoverable by analysis and study. It consists simply in the reader's assurance of the writer's complete mastery over all the infinite applicability and resources of the English language. Hence involutions and parentheses, " cycle on epicycle," evolve themselves into a stately clearness and harmony; and sentences and paragraphs, loaded with suggestion, roll on smoothly and musically, without either fatiguing or cloyingrather, indeed, to the surprise as well as delight of the reader; for De Quincey is always ready to indulge in feats of style, witching the world with that sort of noble horsemanship which is as graceful as it is daring.It has been complained that, in spite of the apparently full confidences of the Confessions and Autobiographic Sketches, readers are left in comparative ignorance, biographically speaking, of the man De Quincey. Two passages in his Confessions afford sufficient clues to this mystery. In one he describes himself " as framed for love and all gentle affections," and in another confesses to the " besetting infirmity " of being " too much of an eudaemonist." " I hanker," he says, " too much after a state of happiness, both for myself and others; I cannot face misery, whether my own or not, with an eye of sufficient firmness, and am little capable of surmounting present pain for the sake of any recessionary benefit." His sensitive disposition dictated the ignoring in his writings of traits merely personal to himself, as well as his ever-recurrent resort to opium as a doorway of escape from present ill; and prompted those habits of seclusion, and that apparently capricious abstraction of himself from the society not only of his friends, but of his own, family, in which he from time to time persisted. He confessed to occasional accesses of an almost irresistible impulse to flee to the labyrinthine shelterof some great city like London or Paris,there to dwell golitary amid a multitude, buried by day in the cloister-like recesses of mighty libraries, and stealing away by night to some obscure lodging. Long indulgence in seclusion, and in habits of study the most lawless possible in respect of regular hours or any considerations of health or comfort,the habit of working as pleased himself without regard to the divisions of night or day, of times of sleeping or waking, even of the slow procession of the seasons, had latterly so disinclined him to the restraints, however slight, of ordinary social intercourse, that he very seldom submitted to them. On such rare occasions, however, as he did appear, perhaps at some simple meal
[BIBLIOGRAPHY.III 1'853 De Quincey began to prepare an edition of his works, Selections Grave and Gay. Writings Published and Unpublished (14 vols., Edinburgh, 1853186o), followed by a second edition (18631871) with notes by James Hogg and two additional volumes ; a further supplementary volume appeared in 1878. The first comprehensive edition, however, was printed in America (Boston, 20 vols., 18501855) ; and the " Riverside " edition (Boston and New York
' The above account has been corrected and amplified in some statements of fact for this edition. Its original author, John Ritchie Findlay (18241898), proprietor of The Scotsman newspaper, and the donor of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, had been intimate with De Quincey, and in 1886 published his Personal Recollections of him. End of Article: DEPUTY (through the Fr. from a Late Lat. use of deputare, to cut off, allot; putare having the original sense of to trim, prune) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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