[Review of Blackwood’s Magazine for November 1827]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 3 November 1827, p. 206. Reprinted in Groves, ‘Thomas De Quincey and a Review of Blackwood’s Magazine’, The Library, 6th ser., XI (June 1989), pp. 147–9. This is the third of four reviews of Blackwood’s in the Post from September to December 1827. It is linked to the others in its interest in English writers like George Crabbe, Alexander Pope, and Bishop Heber, and its knowledge of continental writers Schlegel and Ugo Foscolo. Individual words or phrases that particularly suggest De Quincey are ‘gorgeous fun’ (which echoes De Quincey’s insistence that reading should bring pleasure), and ‘materiam superabat opus’, which seems to have been on De Quincey’s mind at this time; it occurs twice in his other essays of this period (see above, p. 56), as well as once in translation (i.e., ‘The critique is much superior to the translation’; see above, p. 10).