160 MEMOIE OF JOHN WILSON. 



all the more reason why you should be proclaimed a martyr, and 

 all your opponents profligate mercenaries. If I exaggerate, I am 

 open to correction ; hut such appears to me to have been the pre- 

 vailing tone among the men who figured most actively in public life 

 about the time to which this chapter relates. In literature, at that 

 time, the Edinburgh JRevieio was supreme. Its doctrines were re- 

 ceived, among those who believed in them, as oracular; and in the 

 hands of the small retailers of political and literary dogmas Avho 

 swore by it, these were becoming insufferably tiresome to the Tory 

 part of mankind, who, singularly enough, had no literary oracle of 

 their own north of the Tweed. I suppose the party being strong in 

 power did not feel the want of such influence. The more ardent and 

 active minds on that side, however, were naturally impatient of the 

 dictatorship exercised by Mr. JefiYey, and wanted only opportunity 

 to establish an opposing force in the interests of their own venerable 

 creed. That opportunity came, and was vigorously used, too vig- 

 orously at first, sometimes cruelly and unjustly, but ultimately with 

 results eminently beneficial. 



To begin then at the beginning. In the month of December, 

 1816, Mr. William Blackwood, who had by uncommon tact and 

 energy, established his character in the course of a few years as an 

 enterprising publisher in Edinburgh, was applied to by two literary 

 men to become the publisher of a new monthly magazine, which 

 they had projected.* These gentlemen were James Cleghorn,f 

 who had acquired some literary position as editor of a Farmers' 

 Magazine, and Thomas Pringle,| a pleasant writer and poet, who 

 afterwards emigrated to South Africa.§ The idea was good, and 

 the time fitting for the " felt want," which is now pleaded about 

 once a week as the ground for establishing some new journal, was 

 then a serious reality ; the only periodical in Edinburgh of any 

 mark besides the Review being the Scots Magazine, published by 

 Constable, once a highly respectable, but at that time a vapid and 



* Mr. Gillies in his Memoirs gives the credit of the origin and suggestion to Hogg.— VoL i n 

 p. 230. 



t Mr. Cleghorn was more fortunate in his financial than his literary undertakings, having 

 been the founder of the Scottish Provident Institution, by whom a monument to his memory has 

 boon erected in the Edinburgh Warriston Cemetery. He died in May, 1838. 



$ Author of Narrative of a Residence in South Africa, Ephemerides, &c. ; born 1YS9, died 1 B84 



§ By a curious coincidence both these gentlemen were lame, and went on crutches, an infirmity 

 to which ludicrous but most improper allusion is made in the Chaldee MS., where they are de- 

 scribed as coming in " skipping on staves. 1 " 



