a
sweetheart she called him _Stag_, though everybody else was obliged to
call him Stagyrite), 'how will they know it's meant for me, Stag?' Upon
which I am sorry to say the philosopher fell to cursing and swearing,
bestowing blessings on his own optics and on posterity's, meaning yours
and mine, saying: 'Let them find it out.' Well, now, you see I _have_
found it out. But that is more than I hope for my crypto-criminals, and
therefore I take this my only way of giving them celebration and
malediction in one breath.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] Notwithstanding what he had written in the essay on the 'Essenes,'
no doubt De Quincey, if he had completed this paper, could not have
escaped characteristic, and perhaps grimly humorous, references of his
own to the Sicarii, of whom Josephus has a good deal to tell in his
'Jewish War'; for it seems to us his thoughts were bearing directly that
way. Josephus says of the Sicarii: 'In these days there arose another
sort of robbers in Jerusalem, who were named Sicarii, who slew men in
the day-time and in the middle of the city, more especially at the
festivals. There they mixed with the multitude, and having concealed
little daggers under their garments, with these they stabbed those that
were their enemies; and when any fell down dead, the murderers joined
the bystanders in expressing their indignation; so that from their
plausibilities they could by no means be discovered. The first man that
was slain by them was Jonathan the high-priest, after which many were
slain every day.'--ED.

[10] 'Postern-gate.' See the legend of Sir Eustace the Crusader, and the
good Sir Hubert, who 'sounded the horn which he alone could sound,' as
told by Wordsworth.

_XI. ANECDOTES--JUVENAL._

All anecdotes, as I have often remarked in print, are lies. It is
painful to use harsh words, and, knowing by my own feelings how much the
reader is shocked by this rude word _lies_, I should really be much
gratified if it were possible to supplant it by some gentler or more
courteous word, such as _falsehoods_, or even _fibs_, which dilutes the
atrocity of untruth into something of an amiable weakness, wrong, but
still venial, and natural (and so far, therefore, reasonable). Anything
for peace: but really in this instance I cannot indulge the reader. The
instincts of morality will not allow of it, and still less the passion
which made Juvenal a poet,[11] viz., the passion of enormous and bloody
indignation.