ABSTRACT
First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 12 January 1828, p. 287. Never reprinted. Links to previous articles in the Post include the lines about ‘the beautiful air “Auld Robin Gray”’ (which distinctly echoes p. 235, above), the phrases from Hamlet and Alexander Pope, and the couplet about ‘Tweedledum and Tweedle-dee’ (see above, p. 75). The opening words of the second paragraph, ‘To those who are familiar with’, recall similar phrases like ‘To those who are … aware of’ and ‘To those who are … acquainted with’, in the recent articles on opera (pp. 180, 228). Another phrase, ‘old Haydn’, echoes phrases like ‘old Goethe’ (Vol. 6, p. 276), which were among De Quincey’s stock-in-trade, but were not used by his more sober colleagues at the Post. The quotation from The Merchant of Venice, coming as it does from a speech about ‘the sweet power of music’, is more appropriate than readers of the Post may have realized. In the last paragraph, the suggestion that ‘nothing less than a journey to Italy’, by Miss Paton, ‘will satisfy us’, sounds very much like the kind of wit that is specific to De Quincey’s articles. Turning to stylistic effects, we find a great many dashes, a sentence beginning with ‘But’, and occasional inversions like ‘Truly sorry are we’ and ‘reasonably assured are we’.
