[Review of Blackwood’s Magazine for December 1827]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 1 December 1827, p. 238. Reprinted Tave, pp. 212–19 (with attribution, pp. 219–20). This is the fourth (and last) of De Quincey’s reviews of Blackwood’s for the Saturday Post. The wit and humour, literary allusions, and discussion of political economy, leave little doubt as to the author. The strongest evidence, however, is the reference to De Quincey’s recent critique of the Edinburgh Review, in terms of what ‘we observed in our last notice of the Edinburgh’. Like other reviews by De Quincey for the Post, this one has sentences starting with ‘But’, ‘Now’, and ‘For’, dashes, italics, and the use of a numerical series, and colloquial turns of phrase like ‘we have the writer in a noose’.