[Review of Blackwood’s Magazine for September 1827]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 8 September 1827, p. 142. Reprinted Tave, pp. 95–103 (with attribution, pp. 103–5). De Quincey regularly reviewed Blackwood’s for the Post from September to December 1827. Unlike most of his colleagues at the Post, De Quincey admired the free-wheeling and mainly secular spirit of Blackwood’s. In this review, some of the internal evidence includes the story from Shelvocke (which De Quincey re-tells, similarly in the context of Russian threats to India, in his 1844 essay on ‘Afghanistan’ (see Vol. 15)). In an essay on Coleridge in 1834, De Quincey says Shelvocke’s memoir was one of the sources for ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (see Vol. 9). Other signs include the interest in German and English literature, and colloquialisms like ‘beaten all to sticks’ and ‘thumping’, alternating with classical quotations and lines from little-known poems.