secret, he now discovered, was
this: he would consider himself in the light of a humming top; he would
make an apparatus (and he made it) for having himself launched, like a
top, upon the ceiling, and regularly spun. Then the vertiginous motion
of the human top would overcome the force of gravitation. He should, of
course, spin upon his own axis, and sleep upon his own axis--perhaps he
might even dream upon it; and he laughed at 'those scoundrels, the
flies,' that never improved in their pretended art, nor made anything of
it. The principle was now discovered; 'and, of course,' he said, 'if a
man can keep it up for five minutes, what's to hinder him from doing so
for five months?' 'Certainly, nothing that I can think of,' was the
reply of my sister, whose scepticism, in fact, had not settled upon the
five months, but altogether upon the five minutes. The apparatus for
spinning him, however, perhaps from its complexity, would not work--a
fact evidently owing to the stupidity of the gardener. On reconsidering
the subject, he announced, to the disappointment of some among us, that,
although the physical discovery was now complete, he saw a moral
difficulty. It was not a _humming_ top that was required, but a _peg_
top. Now, in order to keep up the _vertigo_ at full stretch, without
which, to a certain extent, gravitation would prove too much for him, he
needed to be whipped incessantly. But that was what a gentleman ought
not to tolerate: to be scourged unintermittingly on the legs by any grub
of a gardener, unless it were Father Adam himself, was a thing that he
could not bring his mind to face.' Attempted improvements in the art of
flying, which, he alleged, was then 'in a condition disgraceful to
civilized society;' the composition and exhibition of that bloody
tragedy, 'Sultan Amurath;' the conduct of a protracted war which arose
out of a fancied insult from a factory boy, whom, surveying with intense
disdain, 'he bade draw near that he might 'give his flesh to the fowls
of the air!'' the government of the imaginary kingdom of
'Tigrosylvania'--occupied the attention of this hundred-handed youth
until his death, at the age of sixteen--all of which is narrated with
unequalled pathos and humor. But there is still another section of the
narrative art, yet more sublime and unapproachable, where De Quincey
stands alone--the section in which are recorded his dreams. These are
without a rival or even a precedent in the English