Coleridge's influence on De Quincey is nowhere more evident than in the latter's reading of Kant and of the German literature and philosophy in general. De Quincey's exposure of Coleridge's German plagiarisms has been instrumental in drawing attention to this aspect of their common interests, their rare early recognition and knowledge of the importance of the German idealist philosophers and Kant for their age. As De Quincey pointed out in 1834, Coleridge's now infamous plagiarism of his derivation of the identity of subject and object from Schelling in the Biographia ‘could in prudence have been risked only by relying too much upon the slight knowledge of German literature in this country, and especially of that section of the German literature’ (W, p. 40). Thus De Quincey's revelation of Coleridge's plagiarisms is taken to be the betrayal of one initiate into German literature by another, thereby proclaiming his own predominance in the field. De Quincey's mocking injunction to Coleridge in the 1823 ‘Letters to a Young Man’ to ‘leave transcendentalism to me and other young men’ (M, X, p. 22) would appear to inaugurate this aspect of their literary rivalry. But De Quincey unsportingly waited for Coleridge's death before performing his apparent literary assassination in the charges of plagiarism that he brought forward in 1834. Even earlier than this there is the unauthenticated (but quite characteristic) challenge—put into the mouth of the ‘Opium-Eater’ in John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae—that should Coleridge become editor of the Quarterly Review, the ‘Opium-Eater’ would personally undertake to ‘examine his pretensions, and show him up as impostor’:

Modern scholars such as Albert Goldman have indicated De Quincey's own reliance on German scholarship as the basis of many of his more abstruse and curious pieces of journalistic writing.