[London Newspapers and the Change of Government]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 22 December 1827, p. 260. Never reprinted. The article is the second of two, in the spot normally reserved for De Quincey’s last-minute political commentaries (under the paper’s masthead and date, on the fourth page). It seems hastily written and poorly proof-read, but its informed discussion of London newspapers, past and present, was a specialty of De Quincey’s, and one on which few, if any, of the other contributors would be likely to claim extensive knowledge. The perspective and subject-matter are English, rather than Scottish. Interest in London politics, the Church of England, Winchester, ‘the history of parties’, and ‘the present unnatural Coalition’, all suggest De Quincey, especially in the context of the Edinburgh paper to which he was the only regular English contributor. Other indications include the out-of-the-way allusion to Hamlet, the dashes and italics, the sentences starting with ‘But’ and ‘For’, favourite words like ‘waive’ and ‘Papal’ (see also p. 53, above) and the despairing vision of the final sentence. For “‘palmy’”, in quotation marks as it is here, see also p. 31 (above); and for ‘brutum fulmen’, see also p. 221 (below).