[Review of the Edinburgh Review for October 1827; Part One of Two]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 17 November 1827, p. 222. Reprinted Tave pp. 189–96 (with attribution, pp. 204–11). Quotations from Bacon, Milton, Le Sage, Lucan, and Blackwood’s Magazine strongly suggest De Quincey, but the attribution is placed beyond doubt by the comments on Hazlitt and Edward Irving (both of whom De Quincey knew, and disliked, from his days with the London Magazine). The comments on Kant and Thomas Carlyle also point to De Quincey, especially since Carlyle recorded privately that his article in the latest Edinburgh Review had been ‘received with … approbation. Thus, for instance, De Quincey praises it in his Saturday Post’. A few days after this critique in the Post, De Quincey visited the Carlyle’s and ‘sat till midnight’, talking of German writers, his poverty, and his work for Blackwood’s Magazine and ‘the Saturday Post’ (letter to J. A. Carlyle, 29 Nov., Carlyle Letters, IV, p. 291). Also of note in this review are the sentence beginning with ‘But’, colloquialisms like ‘tight rope’ and ‘Scamp’, the use of ‘viz.’, and the italicization of ‘that’.