The Works of Thomas de Quincey

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: incidental notices, is?that this, beyond all other forms ol domestic authority, furnished to wholesale rapine and peculation their very amplest arena. The relation of father and son, as was that of patron and client, were generally, in the practice of life, cherished with religious fidelity: whereas the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: incidental notices, is?that this, beyond all other forms ol domestic authority, furnished to wholesale rapine and peculation their very amplest arena. The relation of father and son, as was that of patron and client, were generally, in the practice of life, cherished with religious fidelity: whereas the solemn duties of the tutor (i. e., the guardian) to his ward, which had their very root and origin in the tenderest adjurations of a dying friend, though subsequently refreshed by the hourly spectacle of helpless orphanage playing round the margins of pitfalls hidden by flowers, spoke but seldom to the sensibilities of a Koman through any language of oracular power. Few indeed, if any, were the obligations in a proper sense moral which pressed upon the Roman. The main fountains of moral obligation had in Rome, by law or by custom, been thoroughly poisoned. Marriage had corrupted itself through the facility of divorce, .and through the consequences of that facility (viz., levity in choosing, and fickleness in adhering to the choice), into so exquisite a traffic of selfishness, that it could not yield so much as a phantom model of sanctity. The relation of Lusband and wife had, for all moral impressions, perished amongst the Romans. The relation of father and child had all its capacities of holy tenderness crushed out of it under the fierce pressure of penal and vindictive enforcements. The duties of the client to his patron stood upon no basis of simple gratitude or simple fidelity (corresponding to the feudal fealty), but upon a basis of prudential terror; terror from positive law, or from social opinion. From the first intermeddling of law with the movement of the higher moral affections, there is an end to freedom in the act?to purity in the motive?to dignity in the personal rela...