[Michael Scott]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 22 December 1827, p. 262. Reprinted in Groves, ‘De Quincey, Allan Cunningham, and the Edinburgh Saturday Post’, Review of English Studies n.s. XXXI [1990], 230–2). De Quincey surely played a role of some sort in this review of his London friend Allan Cunningham. Yet most of the first paragraph, with its soothing celebration of ‘sweet and plaintive ballads’, is simply too saccharine and one-dimensional to be his.