ABSTRACT
First published Edinburgh Evening Post, probably in the missing issue of 22 August 1828. Reprinted Dumfries Weekly Journal (‘From the Edinburgh Post’), 26 August 1828 [p. 2]. Reprinted, with attribution, in ‘“Lost” Post’ pp. 44–52. This article contains no Scottish words or phrases, and is thoroughly English, in its perspective or outlook. It has the word ‘Alderman’, which rarely occurs in Scottish discourse (see Vol. 5, p. 2). Other signs include favourite words like ‘apostate’, ‘apostacy’, ‘waiving’ and ‘solemn’, the inversion ‘Happy we are’, the short rhetorical question ‘Well, what of that?’, slang or colloquial expressions like ‘rat’, ‘ratted’, ‘kicked out’, and ‘scrub’, sentences beginning with ‘But’, and the italicization of ‘that’. In the third paragraph, the writer indicates that, although resident in Edinburgh, he had been reading London’s Courier newspaper for some time – and De Quincey had indeed been writing about the Courier, and other London papers, in the Post since 1827 (see Vol. 5, pp. 75, 185, 255–6). The distinction between ‘the matter’ and the ‘manner’ of Dawson’s speech sounds very De Quinceyan; it recalls his earlier remarks in the Post about ‘those who estimate the matter and the manner of a writer according to their just proportions’ (Vol. 5, p. 136). Most importantly, one passage strongly resembles the article ‘The Duke of Wellington and Mr. Peel’, in Blackwood’s in March 1829, where De Quincey uses the same term ‘ratted’, and the same ironic phrase about the ‘memory of the ‘prentice boys, or other “trash” of that description’, in discussing the same speech by Dawson (Vol. 7, pp. 34n, 41n).
