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Memorials: Klosterheim. The sphinx's riddle. The templars' dialogues
Memorials Klosterheim The sphinx's riddle The templars' dialogues Author: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: DIALOGUES. ORIGINAL ADVERTISEMENT, IN APRIL, 1824. I Hate resolved to fling my analysis of Mr. Ricardo's system into the form of Dialogues. A few words wil... more »l suffice to determine the principles of criticism which can fairly be applied to such a form of composition on such a subject. It cannot reasonably be expected that dialogues on Political Economy should pretend to the appropriate beauty of dialogues as dialogues, by throwing any dramatic interest into the parts sustained by the different speakers, or any characteristic distinctions into their style. Elegance of this sort, if my time had allowed of it, or I had been otherwise capable of producing it, would have -been here misplaced. Not that I would say even of Political Economy, in the words commonly applied to such subjects, that "Ornari res ipsa negatt contenta doceri:" for all things have their peculiar beauty and sources of ornament — determined by their ultimate ends, and by the process of the mind in pursuing them. Here, as in the processes of nature and in mathematical demonstrations, the appropriate elegance is derived from the simplicity of the means employed, as expressed in the "Lex Parcimonise " ("Prustra fit per plura, quod fieri fas erat per pauciora"), and other maxims of that sort. This simplicity, however, must be looked for in the order and relation of the thoughts, and in the steps through which they are trained to lead into each other, rather than in any anxious conciseness as to words; which, on the contrary, I have rather sought to avoid in the earlier Dialogues, in order that I might keep those distinctions longer before the reader from which all the rest were to be derived. For be who has fully mastered the doctrine of Value is already a good political economist. Now, if any man should object, that...« less