thomas de quincey
his dislike of throwing anything––books, papers, manuscripts––away, combined with an even more intense objection to having his belongings ‘tidied’. In this he did not differ from most men of letters; but few even of them can have collected such literary snow-drifts as De Quincey managed to amass during the last years of his life. When tables, chairs, bed and floor were entirely encumbered, and even the narrow path between the door and the fireplace had become silted up, he would simply lock the door of the room and betake himself to another lodging, there to remain until once more driven on by a similar state of affairs. At his death, no less than six sets of lodgings were found in this condition. Edward Sackville-West, A Flame in Sunlight,
Thomas Love Peacock . 1785–1866 Peacock entered the service of the East India Company in . The papers which won him his place there were returned by the examiners with the comment ‘Nothing superfluous, nothing wanting’. One of his colleagues at India House was the Utilitarian philosopher and historian James Mill, a man whom he was never likely to find congenial: Coulson [a journalist] once asked Peacock: ‘When I know Mill well, shall I like him––will he like what I like and hate what I hate?’ Peacock replied: ‘No, he will hate what you hate, and hate everything you like.’ Edward Strachey, ‘Recollections of Peacock’,
Richard Whately . 1787–1863 (philosopher and political economist; Archbishop of Dublin)
He was of a gigantic size and a gaunt aspect, with a strange unconsciousness of the body; and, what is perhaps the next best thing to a perfect manner, he had no manner. What his legs and arms were about was best known to themselves. His rank placed him by the side of the LordLieutenant’s wife when dining at the Castle, and the wife of one of the Lord-Lieutenants has told me that she had occasionally to remove the Archbishop’s foot out of her lap. Henry Taylor, Autobiography,
It was Whately who once wrote that ‘it is folly to expect men to do all that they may be reasonably expected to do’.