[Rumours from Paris]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 19 April 1828, p. 396. Never reprinted. This leader is linked to De Quincey’s former leaders, through its remarks on ‘the Paris and London journals’ ‘for the last five months’. The scepticism about anticipations of a Turkish war by those newspapers was also one of De Quincey’s specialties at the time. Like other leaders for the Post, this one was apparently written in haste, and proof-read with equal haste. (Its second sentence is the kind of run-on sentence that appears in De Quincey’s manuscripts of political writings at this time (see Vol. 6, pp. 302–7), and which normally would have been remedied by De Quincey or a proof-reader or typesetter.) Even so, the article has many signs of De Quincey, such as the British rather than Scottish perspective, the italics and dashes, and the four ‘between[s]’. One sentence sounds very De Quinceyan: ‘Then again for these parties to the great event – who were they?’ The daring use of anacoluthon (or ‘broken-backed’ sentence-structure) is an occasional feature of De Quincey’s writings of the late 1820s (see, for instance, the sentence on ‘Drunkenness’ (above, p. 64), and the sentence ‘For example, war – what says political economy to that?’ (above, p. 128)); and it does not appear in any articles in the Saturday Post except ones that seem to be De Quincey’s.