[Italian Tragedy: Foreign Quarterly Review]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 13 October 1827, p. 182. Never reprinted. The ‘Foreign Quarterly Review’ was the name under which Robert Gillies founded the journal which he had originally planned to call the ‘The Argo’ (see below, p. 169; and also Vol. 6, p. 3). De Quincey had assisted Gillies, around January 1827, in enlisting contributors to the early numbers of what became the Foreign Quarterly. Now that Gillies was living in London, De Quincey was one of the very few people in Edinburgh who would know (as the writer of this note does) the identities of the (anonymous) contributors to the second issue of Gillies’s journal. By a further coincidence, De Quincey had known William Roscoe, and his son Thomas Roscoe, in Liverpool during his youth; his low opinion of both men (see Vol. 6, p. 15n., and Vol. 9) seems reflected in the following note, with its peremptory dismissal of ‘Mr. Roscoe’, without even saying which of the two (father or son) is meant.