nsfer to
France, in connection with William the Norman, it received its
territorial appellation from the village of Quincy, in Normandy. Thence,
at the time of the Norman Invasion, it was transplanted to England,
where, as afterwards in Scotland, it rose to the highest position, not
merely in connection with a lordly title and princely estates, but
chiefly on account of valuable services rendered to the State, and
conferring preeminence in baronial privilege and consideration.

So sensitive was De Quincey, even at the early age of fifteen, on the
point of his descent, lest from his name he might be supposed of French
extraction, that, even into the ears of George III. (that king having,
in an accidental interview with him at Frogmore, suggested the
possibility of his family having come to England at the time of the
Huguenot exodus from France) he ventured to breathe the most earnest
protest against any supposition of that nature, and boldly insisted upon
his purely Norman blood,--blood that in the baronial wars had helped to
establish the earliest basis of English constitutional liberty, and that
had flowed from knightly veins in the wars of the Crusades. Robert De
Quincey came into England with William the Conqueror, uniting with whose
fortunes, he fared after the Conquest as a feudal baron, founding the
line of Winchester; and that he was a baron of the first water is
evident from the statement of Gerard Leigh,--that his armorial device
was inscribed (and how inscribed, if not memorially and as a mark of
eminent distinction?) on the stained glass in the old church of St.
Paul's.

And here it is proper that the reader's attention should be momentarily
diverted to the American branch of this family, at the head of which
stands the Hon. Josiah Quincy, (the aristocratic _De_ being omitted,)--a
branch which fled from England in the early part of the seventeenth
century, to avoid a strife which had then become too intense and fiery
to admit of reconciliation, and which, indeed, a few years after their
withdrawal, culminated in civil war. As illustrating the inevitableness
of any great moral issue, no matter how vast the distance which at a
critical moment we may put between it and ourselves,--as indicating how
surely the Nemesis, seemingly avoided, but really only postponed, will
continue to track our flying footsteps, even across the barren wastes of
ocean, that ought, if anything could, to interpose an effectual barrier