[To a Reader; On Coleridge, Southey, and ‘The Devil’s Walk’]

First published Edinburgh Evening Post, 26 July 1828, p. 95. Never reprinted. This reply to a complaint from ‘Iota’ appeared in the same issue as the ‘Invitation to a Set-to’ (above, pp. 225–6). Both pieces are editorial in nature, and both appeared outside the ‘Scottish Literary Gazette’ section, which was normally Crichton’s domain. The subject-matter of this reply is almost entirely English rather than Scottish. Its discussion of Coleridge and Southey could only have come from De Quincey, of all the regular contributors. The suggestion that Coleridge and Southey might deserve punishment, for the ‘barbarism’ of ‘mangl[ing]’ an early poem, sounds very De Quinceyan; in later years, De Quincey would claim that Coleridge was ‘indictable at common law’, and ‘punishable by fine and imprisonment’, for some of his ‘criminal’ ‘barbarisms’; and furthermore Wordsworth, according to De Quincey, showed ‘criminal facility’ in revising some early poems on advice from Coleridge (see Japp, II, pp. 29–30, passim, and 207). Elsewhere, De Quincey charges that most Greek historians were ‘guilty of dulness’ (‘A Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature’; Vol. 10), and that ‘the torture ought to be administered’ to ‘the author of every big book’ (‘Professor Wilson’; Vol. 17).