LITERATURE. BLACKWOOD^ MAGAZINE. 155 



Here also may come in two pleasant letters from Jeffrey, before 

 we arrive at the point when it became impossible for the editor of 

 the Edinburgh Review to exchange confidential and friendly com- 

 munications with an acknowledged contributor to Blackwood : — 



"Ckaigcrook, \Qth Octobei; 1811. 



" My dear Wilson : — Do you think you could be prevailed on to 

 write a review for me now and then ? Perhaps this may appear to 

 you a very audacious request, and I am not sure that I should have 

 had the boldness to make it, but I had heard it surmised, and in 

 very intelligent quarters, that you had occasionally condescended to 

 exercise the functions of a critic in works where your exertions must 

 necessarily obtain less celebrity than in our journal. When I apply 

 for assistance to persons in whose talents and judgment I have as 

 much confidence as I have in yours, I leave of course the choice of 

 their subjects very much to themselves, being satisfied that it must 

 always be for my interest to receive all they are most desirous of 

 sending. It is therefore rather with a view to tempt than to assist 

 you, that I venture to suggest to you a general review of our dra- 

 matic poetry, a subject which I long meditated for myself, but which 

 I now feel that I shall never have leisure to treat as I should wish 

 to treat it, and upon which indeed I could not now enter, without 

 a pretty laborious resumption of my early and half-forgotten studies. 

 To you, I am quite sure, it is familiar, and while I am by no means 

 certain that our opinions could always coincide, I have no hesitation 

 in saying, that I should very much distrust my own when they were 

 in absolute opposition to yours, and that I am unfeignedly of opinion 

 that in your hands the disquisition will be more edifying and quite 

 as entertaining as ever it could have been in mine. It is the appear- 

 ance of the weak and dull article in the last Quarterly, which has 

 roused me to the resolution of procuring something more worthy of 

 the subject for the Edinburgh, and there really is nobody but your- 

 self to whom I can look with any satisfaction for such a paper. 



" I do not want, as you will easily conjecture, a learned, ostenta- 

 tious, and antiquarian dissertation, but an account written with taste 

 and feeling, and garnished, if you please, with such quotations as 

 may be either very curious or very delightful. I intended some- 

 thing of this sort when I began my review of Ford's plays, but I ran 

 off the course almost at starting, and could never get back again. 



