[Review of the Edinburgh Review for October 1827; Part Two of Two]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 24 November 1827, p. 230. Reprinted Tave, pp. 197–204 (with attribution, pp. 204–11). See above, p. 133, for Thomas Carlyle’s remark that his article in the Edinburgh had been ‘praise[d]’ by De Quincey, ‘in his Saturday Post’. Carlyle’s first-hand evidence is corroborated by the remarks on Edmund Burke, Jeremy Taylor, and Immanuel Kant, and the very De Quinceyan discussion of ‘fancy’ in relation to ‘judgment’. Classical quotations from Homer and Lucan, interspersed with colloquialisms like ‘dull as ditch water’, and the passage of circus-dialogue by ‘one of Mr. Pidcock’s showmen’, also point to De Quincey, when they occur in the Post. Turning to politics, the word ‘apostacy’, and the idea of ‘two creeds, Whig and Tory, whose synthesis composes the total thing called the British Constitution’, are common in De Quincey’s articles at this time.