ABSTRACT
First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 1 March 1828, p. 340. Never reprinted. The article has ‘Scotch’ instead of ‘Scottish’, as well as some very appropriate and out-of-the-way quotations from Shakespeare and Pope. The sentence, ‘We entertain a sort of religious horror, whenever Handel or Mozart are turned into ridicule, and almost wished for inquisitorial terrors … on this occasion’, sounds like one of De Quincey’s many forays into black humour in the late 1820s. Other familiar phrases include ‘Our limits this week’, ‘taxing the patience’ (which recalls the ‘tax on the … reader’ (see above, p. 107)), and ‘we had a word or two’ (recalling the same phrase in the essay on Cornillon (see above, p. 162)).
