DE QUINCEY (THOMAS) Printed galley proof from his essay The Pagan Oracles, with numerous autograph additions, deletions and amendments, including the insertion of a substantial 14-line passage beginning "...What was this situation? – Early in the 8th century [let us say A.D. 707] after Christ Roderick the Goth, King of Spain, taking an infamous advantage of his royal power was said to have violated the person of Count Julian's daughter...", 2 pages on a single leaf printed recto and verso, dust-staining, discolouration, creased at folds, edges frayed, 565 x 140mm., [after 1858] A corrected galley proof of part of De Quincey's critique on the nature of ancient Greek divination. The text first appeared in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, CCCXVII, March 1842, vol.LI, pp.[277]-295, with the text beginning "To leave the Fathers, and to state our own views". It was subsequently reprinted in Essays Sceptical and Anti-Sceptical of 1858 with the opening line 'To leave the Patristic literature, and to state my own views...' as printed here, but without the present corrections. The corrections made by De Quincy here were subsequently taken up and later published in David Masson's The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, 1897, with our long passage appearing as a footnote to page 77.