re _I_
do. When the reins are put into my hands I stick at nothing--headlong I
drive like a lunatic, until the very room in which we are talking, with
all that it inherits, seems to spin round with absolute vertigo at the
extravagances I utter.

Thirdly, but again, was the thing really said? For, as another censure
upon the whole library of _ana_, I can assert--that, if the license of
conversation is enormous, to that people who inhale that gas of
colloquial fermentation seldom mean much above one part in sixty of what
they say, on the other hand the license of reporters is far greater. To
forget the circumstances under which a thing was said is to alter the
thing, to have lost the context, the particular remark in which your
own originated, the mitigations of a harsh sentiment from playfulness of
manner; in short, to drop the _setting_ of the thoughts is oftentimes to
falsify the tendency and value of those thoughts.

NOTE BY THE EDITOR.--The _Phil_. here referred to is the
_Philoleutheros Anglicanus_ of the essay on 'Protestantism,' as
shortened by De Quincey, and with whom De Quincey, in that essay,
deals very effectively and wittily on occasion.

_X. MURDER AS A FINE ART._

(SOME NOTES FOR A NEW PAPER.)

A new paper on Murder as a Fine Art might open thus: that on the model
of those Gentlemen Radicals who had voted a monument to Palmer, etc., it
was proposed to erect statues to such murderers as should by their
next-of-kin, or other person interested in their glory, make out a claim
either of superior atrocity, or, in equal atrocity, of superior
neatness, continuity of execution, perfect preparation or felicitous
originality, smoothness or _curiosa felicitas_ (elaborate felicity). The
men who murdered the cat, as we read in the Newgate Calendar, were good,
but Williams better who murdered the baby. And perhaps (but the hellish
felicity of the last act makes us demur) Fielding was superior. For you
never hear of a fire swallowing up a fire, or a rain stopping a deluge
(for this would be a reign of Kilkenny cats); but what fire, deluge, or
Kilkenny cats could not do, Fielding proposed, viz., to murder the
murderers, to become himself the Nemesis. Fielding was the murderer of
murderers in a double sense--rhetorical and literal. But that was, after
all, a small matter compared with the fine art of the man calling
himself Outis, on which for a moment we must dwell. Outis--so at all
event