[‘Greece under the Romans’, draft]

Transcribed by Japp and published in PW, vol. II, pp. 60–90, the present location of this manuscript draft is unknown. It was written between January and March 1844, as an early version of his review (this draft is internally dated ‘March, 1844’). Because Blackwood’s was also the publisher of the book, De Quincey received an advance copy to review for the Magazine. On January 6, he reports ’The “Greece” I have read, and find it interesting’ (NLS MS 4070 ff. 196/7). On 2 March he wrote that ‘I have an article finished, or all but, — which on Monday (or at the latest on Tuesday morning) I will send; viz. on Mr Finlay’s Greece’ (NLS MS 4070 f. 199). On 16 March he explains that had ‘miscalculated’. He ‘had not quite finished that Finlay paper’ when he had turned to his political article on Ireland, thinking that he could submit both together. ‘I have nearly failed in both. But I hope that after all it may turn out that I have failed in the Pol. Art.; — that is, I hope that if you receive the paper to-morrow (of which I can assure) it will be in time’ (NLS MS 4070 f. 200). In April his political article, ‘Ireland’, was published. Acknowledging the problems of his draft, he explained that it was written in ‘the distracted way in which the distraction of laud[sup]m forces me to write. I should have thought — that, if too late as a review (of which I was not at all aware), it might have done as ‘Reflections on Mr Finlay’s Greece’, or some similar title’ (NLS MS 4070 f. 209/10). Six months went by before De Quincey had the revised version of his review ready for submission: ‘I now send the Finlay corrected with a closing sentence’, he wrote to Robert Blackwood on 15 August 1844 (NLS MS 4070 ff. 215/16). The second version was published in Blackwood’s in October.