ABSTRACT
First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 9 February 1828, p. 316. Reprinted Tave, pp. 300–10 (with attribution, pp. 310–11). This leading-article is one of a series on Huskisson (in the Saturday Post and its successor the Evening Post), one of which exists in manuscript in De Quincey’s hand (see Vol. 6, pp. 302–7). Internal evidence here includes the personal knowledge of ‘Poggio’ Shepherd, a minor Liverpool writer whom De Quincey had known in his youth, interesting allusions to Pope, Shakespeare, Horace, the italicized ‘that’, colloquialisms like ‘splitting the difference’, and the pun about ‘If ever it should happen to a friend of ours to be tied to a post, and publicly rubbed down for his misdoings, may the Gods allot him no harsher a currycomb’.
