[Pagan Mythology]

Worcester College MS 128: 2 sheets, the first 12 × 18.5 cm, the second a folio sheet 37 × 22.5 cm folded geminate to form four pages 18.5 × 22.5 cm. The MS therefore consists of 6 pages, written in sepia ink, with interventions in Japp’s hand written in black ink. Japp’s interventions are largely ignored in this transcript. It should be noted, however, that at the top of the first page of the large sheet Japp has written ‘Why the Pagans failed to invest their God with any idea of Grandeur’. In the version that he published (PW, vol. I, pp. 33–8); this was altered as title to conform more accurately to De Quincey’s assertion in his opening paragraph: ‘the Pagans could not invest y^r gods with any iota of grandeur.’ Japp does not transcribe five and a half lines of a digression in the middle of the verso of the first sheet, nor the five and a half lines on the Arabian Nights at the close of the final page. The folio sheet bears twice the watermark: ‘J. Whatman 1841’. On this same paper stock, also watermarked ‘J. Whatman 1841’, De Quincey drafted the passage on the death of his sister Jane for ‘The Afflictions of Childhood’, Berg MS 213044B. f.2 (see transcript above of the notes and drafts for Suspiria). In the digressionary passage omitted by Japp, there is a reference to the Standard, 11December, indicating that this manuscript was probably written in the last month of 1844 or in the first month of 1845.