Thomas De Quincey

Coleridge and Opium-eating and Other Writings Thomas De Quincey

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1862. Excerpt: ... TOILETTE OF THE HEBREW LADY. EXHIBITED IN SIX SCENES. To the Editor of a great Literary Journal. Sir,--Some years ago you published a translation of Bottiger's Sabina, a learned account of the Eoman toilette. I here send you a companion to that work,--not a direct translation, but a very minute abstract weeded of that wordiness which has made the original unreadable, and.therefore unread from a similar dissertation by Hartmann on the toilette and the wardrobe of the ladies of ancient Palestine. Hartmann was a respectable Oriental scholar, and he published his researches, which occupy three thick octavos, making in all one thousand four hundred and eighty-eight pages, under the title of Die Hebrderin am Putztische und ah Braut, Amsterdam, 1809 (The Hebrew Woman at her Toilette, and in her Bridal Character). I understand that the poor man is now gone to Hades, where, let us hope, that it is considered by Minos or Eadamanthus no crime in a learned man to be exceedingly tedious, and to repeat the same thing ten times over, or even, upon occasion, fifteen times, provided that his own upright heart should incline him to think that course the most advisable. Certainly Mr Hartmann has the most excellent gifts at verbal expansion, and talents the most splendid for tautology, that ever came within my knowledge; and I have found no particular difficulty in compressing every tittle of what relates to his subject into a compass which, I imagine, will fill about one-twentyeighth part at the utmost of the original work. It was not to be expected, with the scanty materials before him, that an illustrator of the Hebrew costume should be as full and explicit as JBottiger, with the advantage of writing upon a theme more familiar to us Europeans of this day than any parallel...