ABSTRACT
The manuscript is in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. Late in 1821, De Quincey drafted an essay, ‘On the London Magazine,’ intended for the December issue, praising the first year of the Taylor-Hessey management and anticipating editorial goals for the coming year. Several sheets in this draft were written on one side only. Presumably sometime in late May or June, 1823, De Quincey used the blank side to compose this half-page text on the English reception of Kant. He mentions Willich’s work on Kant, then proceeds to discredit Dugald Stewart for relying on a French commentary. These are matters subsequently developed in the fourth paragraph of the essay published as Letter V, ‘On the English Notices of Kant’ of ‘Letters to a Young Man’, London Magazine VIII (July 1823). In the published version De Quincey states: ‘Stewart has confided chiefly in Dégérando’, which he goes on to describe as ‘the tawdry rhetoric of a Par[is]ian philosophie à la mode’.
