[‘The Great Question – War or No War?’]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 26 April 1828, p. 404. Never reprinted. This leader is the only article to appear under the masthead on this date. It continues De Quincey’s sceptical commentary on rumours from the Mediterranean, in the London press. Like De Quincey, this writer has been reading many different London newspapers, and in one case even morning and evening editions of the same paper. Two expressions link this article to former leaders reprinted in the present volume. The first is the claim that recent events between Russia and Turkey ‘are exactly what we have anticipated for the last five months’; and the second refers to the previous week’s leader (see above, pp. 313–14) in terms of ‘the alleged insurrection in Servia, which we treated last week as so questionable’. With two allusions to De Quincey’s former leading articles, the present piece seems undoubtedly his. Supporting evidence includes the ‘English’ point-of-view, the dash, the short rhetorical question, and the sentence beginning with ‘But’. The sentence about ‘the great question at issue – war or no war?’ also sounds very De Quinceyan in its use of anacoluthon (see the headnote on p. 313). Finally, again like De Quincey, the writer has evidently been reading ‘French journals’, as well as English ones.