eedom. Each of them regarded himself as the child not only of his
father and of his mother, but of his country; and what is the
difference? He who looks on himself as merely the child of his parents,
awaits death in the ordinary course of nature; while he who looks on
himself as the child also of his country, will be ready to lay down his
life rather than see her enslaved....

Do I take credit to myself for having inspired you with sentiments
worthy of your ancestors? Such presumption would expose me to the just
rebuke of every man who hears me. What I maintain is, that these very
sentiments are your own; that the spirit of Athens was the same before
my time,--though I do claim to have had a share in the application of
these principles to each successive crisis. AEschines, therefore, when he
impeaches our whole policy, and seeks to exasperate you against me as
the author of all your alarms and perils, in his anxiety to deprive me
of present credit is really laboring to rob you of your everlasting
renown. If by your vote against Ctesiphon you condemn my policy, you
will pronounce yourselves to have been in the wrong, instead of having
suffered what has befallen you through the cruel injustice of fortune.
But it cannot be; you have not been in the wrong, men of Athens, in
doing battle for the freedom and salvation of all: I swear it by your
forefathers, who bore the battle's brunt at Marathon; by those who stood
in arms at Plataea; by those who fought the sea fight at Salamis; by the
heroes of Artemisium, and many more whose resting-place in our national
monuments attests that, that as our country buried, so she honored, all
alike--victors and vanquished. She was right; for what brave men could
do, all did, though a higher power was master of their fate.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY

(1785-1859)

BY GEORGE R. CARPENTER

[Illustration: THOMAS DE QUINCEY.]

De Quincey's popular reputation is largely due to his autobiographical
essays,--to his 'Confessions.' Whatever may be the merits of his other
writings, the general public, as in the case of Rousseau, of Dante, of
St. Augustine, and of many another, has, with its instinctive and
unquenchable desire for knowledge of the inner life of men of great
emotional and imaginative power, singled out De Quincey's 'Confessions'
as the most significant of his works. There has arisen a popular legend
of De Quincey, making him (not unlike Dante, who had seen hell with his
bodily ey