ABSTRACT
First published Blackwood’s Magazine XX, December 1826, pp. 844–58. Never reprinted. De Quincey never acknowledged this essay in print, perhaps in order to avoid calling attention to his attack on Carlyle’s translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (Vol. 3), which the following article seems to recall, in its remark on a recent ‘hideously mangled’ translation from the German (below, p. 23). Nevertheless, the ledgers of the Blackwood firm prove that De Quincey wrote this review, and was paid for it (NLS MS 30659, p. 95). The anonymity of the piece did not prevent some Blackwood’s people from spotting De Quincey’s distinctive combination of wit and humour with scholarship and colloquial expression. Writing to William Blackwood in 1826, David Moir said that ‘The Review of Gillies is first rate’, with ‘a fine spirit of observation’, an ‘admirable’ ‘knowledge of the subject’, and ‘all the mirth and Magic of the Magazine’; ‘Mr De Quincy has more fun in his composition than I could have calculated on’ (NLS MS 4018, f 55).
