[New Ministerial Arrangements]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 25 August 1827, p. 124. Never reprinted. This leading article on the new Cabinet under Lord Goderich continues from the previous week’s leader (on Canning’s death), with similar remarks on the late Premier’s background and oratorical ‘lustre’, and the ‘dangerous excesses’ of his last years. The leaders for the Post were normally written in great haste, with little or no time for the allusions and finer effects of De Quincey’s more leisured pieces. This one is also linked to the following week’s leader, which refers to it in terms of what ‘we observed last week’ (see below, p. 40). Other evidence of De Quincey in the present piece includes ‘Between’ and ‘England’, where the editor and most of his Scottish contributors would have used ‘betwixt’ and ‘Britain’. The dashes, italics, rhetorical question, and sentences beginning with ‘For’, ‘And’, and ‘But’, are regular features of De Quincey’s journalism, and are quite unlike the more formal style of other writers for the Post. The italicization of ‘that’ and the sentence beginning, ‘And exactly … it is …’, would also be typical of De Quincey at this time. ‘[W]hat is vulgarly called the “warming pan” or locum tenens’ sounds like De Quincey in its humorous yoking of colloquialism with classical learning.