[Cornillon’s Dictionnaire and the Teaching of Languages]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 8 December 1827, p. 246. Never reprinted. This finely-crafted essay is designed to make careless readers assume that its perspective is Scottish, with phrases like ‘our neighbour John Bull’, the Scots word ‘bawbee’, and references to Sir Walter Scott’s novels. A strain of flattery about ‘our fellow modern Athenians’ and ‘we, the men of Athens’, refers to the custom, common in the 1820s, of calling Edinburgh the Modern Athens, because of its prestige as a centre for learning; the same custom is implied in the comparisons between ‘ancient and modern Athenians’. These high-sounding phrases are undermined by a devastating irony that becomes clear in occasional sarcasms about the ‘gullibility’ and ‘delusion’ of ‘the modern Scotch Athenians’, and about the ‘seven sages of Gotham, who most assuredly were Scotsmen’. The ironic undertone will be obvious to informed readers by the third paragraph, where the writer says with a straight face that ‘as Athens was the eye of ancient Greece, as Milton expresses it, Edinburgh is also the eye of modern Great Britain’. Most subscribers to the Post would not have realized that the words about Athens being ‘the eye’ of ancient Greece are spoken by Satan, in Milton’s Paradise Regained, as part of his temptation of Christ; this piece of flattery is highly ironic in Milton’s poem, and equally so in this essay. Lest any doubt remain about the writer’s perspective, the article contains two later quotations from the same speech by Milton’s Satan. De Quincey’s profound interest in ‘the great harmonies of the Satanic speeches in Paradise Regained’ is expressed in his Confessions (Vol. 2, p. 63), and elsewhere (for example, ‘Elements of Rhetoric’, where Satan’s ‘impassioned eloquence’ is ‘not excelled in sublimity by any part of the poem’ (Vol. 6, pp. 168,169).