used to wander past this house, and he recalled with real tenderness this youthful
friendship; he longed again to meet the "noble-minded Ann ——" with whom he
had so often conversed familiarly "more Socratico," whose betrayer he had
vainly sought to punish, and yearned to hear from her in order to convey to her
some authentic message of gratitude, peace, and forgiveness.
His much older brother came home in his thirty-ninth year to die. He had been
unmanageable in youth and his genius for mischief was an inspiration, yet he
was hostile to everything pusillanimous, haughty, aspiring, ready to fasten a
quarrel on his shadow for running before, at first inclined to reduce his boy
brother to a fag, but finally before his death became a great influence in his life.
Prominent were the fights between De Quincey and another older brother on the
one hand, and the factory crowd of boys on the other, a fight incessantly
renewed at the close of factory hours, with victory now on one and now on the
other side; fought with stones and sticks, where thrice he was taken prisoner,
where once one of the factory women kissed him, to the great delight of his
heart. He finally invented a kingdom like Hartley Coleridge, called Gom Broon.
He thought first that it had no location, but finally because his brother's
imaginary realm was north and he wanted wide water between them, his was in
the far south. It was only two hundred and seventy miles in circuit, and he was
stunned to be told by his brother one day that his own domain swept south for
eighty degrees, so that the distance he had relied on vanished. Here, however, he
continued to rule for well or ill, raising taxes, keeping an imaginary standing
army, fishing herring and selling the product of his fishery for manure, and
experiencing how "uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." He worried over his
obligations to Gom Broon, and the shadow froze into reality, and although his
brother's kingdom Tigrosylvania was larger, his was distinguished for eminent
men and a history not to be ashamed of. A friend had read Lord Monboddo's
view that men had sprung from apes, and suggested that the inhabitants of Gom
Broon had tails, so that the brother told him that his subjects had not emerged
from apedom and he must invent arts to eliminate the tails. They must be made
to sit down for six hours a day as a beginning. Abdicate he would not, though all
his subjects had three tails apiece. They had suffered together. Vain was his
brother's suggestion that they have a Roman toga to conceal their ignominious
appendages. He was greatly interested in two scrofulous idiots, who finally died,
and feared that his subjects were akin to them.
John Stuart Mill's Autobiography presents one of the most remarkable