[‘How Easy is the Descent’; Andrew Thomson and the Bible Societies]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 22 December 1827, pp. 262–3. Never reprinted. The indirect beginning, ‘the [old] song’, and the string of pugilistic metaphors, strongly suggest De Quincey. No other known writer for the Post would be remotely likely to submit such a humorous, irreverent, and well-written opening. The start of the third paragraph, ‘We are not mad enough to enter on that interminable subject the Apocrypha Question’, makes a claim that few regular writers for the Post could truthfully have made; and it makes it in a satirical way that very few would have dared. The quotation from Virgil that follows (i.e., ‘Facilis decensus Averni’) seems even more irreverent, in its implication that the battling clergymen are descending into an underworld of their own making, through their pious wranglings.