[Disputatiousness]

These fragments, unpublished during De Quincey’s lifetime, seem to be the remains of a body of manuscript in which De Quincey worked, with some repetition, at elaborating an anecdote taken from Thomas Moore’s Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London: Longman, 1825). Moore’s version of the anecdote appears in a footnote to p. 438 of his biography.