Confession of an English Opium-Eater --- De Quiney

As forestalling搶先行動以破壞(或阻止);先發制(人) that question, and giving it a satisfactory answer

The indignation which it would be apt to易於...的;有...傾向的raise as against an act of wanton folly

demireps: women of doubtful reputation; courtesans.

French literature: probably an allusion to the Confessions ( 1782) ofJean-Jacques Rousseau.


2
Humbly to express A penitential loneliness: from Wordsworth, "'TheWhite Doe of Rylstone'", 176-7.
one celebrated man: S. T. Coleridge.


3
the eloquent and benevolent . . . and many others: in the 1856 revisionDe Quincey complained that the names had been suppressed withouthis permission. He identified the people as, respectively, WilliamWilberforce ( 1759-1833), politician and philanthropist; Dr IsaacMilner ( 1750-1820), Dean of Carlisle; Thomas, first Lord Erskine( 1750-1823), Lord Chancellor; and Coleridge. He had, however,forgotten the identity of 'Mr. Dash, the Philosopher'.


4
That those eat now, who never ate before; And those who always ate, noweat the more: parody of Thomas Parnell, "'The Vigil of Venus'", 1-2.
Mead. Richard Mead ( 1673-1754), a well-known and controversialphysician and author of numerous medical treatises.
Φωναντα συνετοιοι: 'speaking to the wise'.


5
"whose talk is of oxen": misquoted from Ecclesiasticus 38.5.
Humani nihil a se alienum putat: 'he deems nothing human alien tohim'; from Terence, Heauton Timoroumenos, 77.
David Ricardo: pioneer of political economy ( 1772-1823); author ofPrinciples of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817.
Scottish Professors: British Philosophy in the late eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries was dominated by a series of distinguished philo­sophers who taught at the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Theprofessor whom De Quincey knew was John Wilson ( 1785-1854),Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University; under thepseudonym "'Christopher North'" Wilson edited Blackwood's Magazine.
A third exception: the critic and essayist William Hazlitt ( 1778-1830),who in 1805 had published an Essay on the Principles of Human Action,a philosophical work.


7
one of my masters: Mr Morgan, headmaster of Bath Grammar School.
a blockhead: the Revd Edward Spencer, headmaster of WinkfieldSchool, Wiltshire.


Son of Anchises, who came forth from Troy