[Review of the Edinburgh Review for January 1828]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 8 March 1828, p. 350. Reprinted Tave, pp. 329–38 (with attribution, pp. 338–40). The story about Pestalozzi in this review is repeated by De Quincey in 1847, with additional details and a naming of his source (Vol. 16). The details about Dr Wilson Philip’s work on digestion are very close to the remarks in the review of Observations on Diet (see above, pp. 1–5). Other evidence includes the wit and sarcasm, confident discussion of Immanuel Kant and Allan Cunningham, allusion to Milton and Paradise Lost, the word ‘that’ in italics, and the phrase ‘our friend the Standard’ (which recalls ‘Our London friend the Standard’ (above, p. 74)). It also has ‘contemporaries’ (where most of the paper’s contributors would have put ‘cotemporaries’), together with colloquialisms like ‘humbug’, and iconoclastic phrases like ‘a very respectable old blockhead’. Both this review and the leader of 16 February have a sentence beginning with ‘True’ (see above, p. 269).