The various essays that constitute Wordsworth's prose oeuvre bear a strange relationship to the literary marketplace. They are the work of a writer frequently interested in current issues and events (when he writes about the Convention of Cintra, for example, or the Kendal and Windermere Railway, or copyright). Yet even these, the most topical of Wordsworth's essays, also manifest his consciousness of being at some remove from those events. It was a detachment, in part, simply circumstantial. Think, for instance, of Wordsworth's political analysis of the Convention of Cintra, which concluded Napoleon's efforts to bring Portugal into the 'Continental System', his Europe-wide closure of ports to British trade, and to oust the British. Wordsworth wrote the essay on the Convention of Cintra in the Lake District, relying on British newspapers from the middle of September 1808 for news of the Convention and the complex political manoeuvring that Napoleon engaged in with the Spanish and Portuguese, and was continually adjusting his understanding of his audience. He initially planned to express his views at a County Meeting, but later sought publication for the essay as a series of entries in Daniel Stuart's daily newspaper The Courier, and then commissioned De Quincey to shepherd the pamphlet through publication by Longman's at the end of May 1809. Delays overtook the project. The essay that had begun as a contribution to current political debates lost most of its audience before it ever reached them. Sales were minimal, and Wordsworth's earlier plan to bring out a second edition of Cintra dissolved in the face of scant demand for the first.