Another perplexing element was the letter written by De Quincey to his uncle, Colonel Penson, in 1819 (Page's Life, vol. i. p. 207), wherein reference is made to certain contributions to Blackwood's Magazine and The Quarterly Review.
The archives of Maga I find go back only as far as 1825. As to The Quarterly Review, I have Mr. Murray's authority for stating that De Quincey never wrote a line in it. Whether any contributions were ever commissioned, paid for, and afterwards suppressed, I have been unable to ascertain. As a matter of fact, the Schiller Series referred to in the letter to Colonel Penson was never reviewed in The Quarterly at all.
De Quincey as a Newspaper Editor forms the subject of a Chapter in Page's Life. Some extracts are there given from cuttings out of The Westmorland Gazette found amongst the Author's Papers. This editorship (1818-19) was of short duration, and pursued under hostile circumstances, such as distance from the Press, &c., which soon led to De Quincey's resignation. I had hoped to add some further specimens of the newspaper work, but have not, as yet, obtained access to a file of the period. In any future edition I may be able to add this in an Appendix.
The Love-Charm.—In spite of the marvellous tenacity of De Quincey's memory, even as to the very words of a passage in an Author which he had, perhaps, only once read, there were blanks which confounded himself. One of these bore on his contributions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine. Mr. Fields had been so generally careful in obtaining sufficient authority for what he published, in the original American edition, that De Quincey good-humouredly gave the verdict against himself, and 'supposed he must be wrong' in thinking that some of these special papers were not from his pen. Still,—he demurred, and before including them in The Selections Grave and Gay, it was resolved to institute an inquiry. Accordingly, about 1852, I was deputed to interview Mr. Charles Knight, and request his aid. My mission was to obtain, if possible, a correct list of the various contributions to the Quarterly Magazine, including this Love-Charm.
Mr. Knight, Mr. Ramsay (his first lieutenant, as he called him), and myself all met at Fleet Street, where we had the archives of the old Quarterly Magazine turned up, and a list checked. I lately found this particular story also referred to circumstantially in the annexed paragraph contained in Charles Knight's Passages of a Working Life (Thorne's re-issue, vol. I. chap. x. p. 339).
'De Quincey had written to me in December 1824, in the belief that, as he expressed it, "many of your friends will rally about you, and urge you to some new undertaking of the same kind. If that should happen, I beg to say, that you may count upon me, as one of your men, for any extent of labour, to the best of my power, which you may choose to command." He wrote a translation of The Love-Charm of Tieck, with a notice of the Author. This is not reprinted in his Collected Works, though perhaps it is the most interesting of his translations from the German. In this spring and summer De Quincey and I were in intimate companionship. It was a pleasant time of intellectual intercourse for me.'
There is no doubt The Love-Charm would have been reprinted had the Author lived to carry the Selections farther.