ABSTRACT
This manuscript, in the collection of Roy Davids, is a single sheet of unwater-marked white paper, measuring 190 by 232mm, written on both sides in black ink. It contains the most substantial known piece of original verse by De Quincey. The 1821 translation ‘Anna Louisa’ (see Vol. 3, pp. 366–73) runs to 96 lines, but is closely dependent on its German original. There are also two juvenile fragments, one a translation from Horace (see Vol. 1, pp. 1–2, 5–6). Otherwise the only verse by De Quincey to survive is in the 1803 Diary (Vol. 1, pp. 16–17) and consists of a two-line parody of Shenstone and nine undistinguished lines about Senacherib. The present item is in a very different class, though in certain ways it has links to these other attempts, sharing with ‘Anna Louisa’ its hexameter verse-form, and with the ‘Senacherib’ lines an interest in the doom of an oriental tyrant whose fall is related in the Bible.
