lG-i MEMOIR OF JOHN WILSON. 



modicum of abuse in the pages of his Magazine. But he had a dif- 

 ficult task in accommodating the inclinations of his fiery associates 

 to the dictates of prudence and justice ; appreciating highly, as he 

 did, their remarkable talents, and unwilling to lose their services, 

 it required great tact and firmness to restrain their sharp pens, and 

 he more than once paid dearly, in solid cash, for their wanton and 

 immoderate expressions.* 



The public, whether pleased or angry, inquired with wonder 

 where all this sudden talent had lain hid that now threatened to set 

 the Forth on fire. Suspicions were rife ; but Mr. Blackwood could 

 keep a secret, and knew the power of mystery. Who his contribu- 

 tors were, who his editor, were matters on which neither he nor 

 they chose to give more information than was necessary. It might 

 suffice for the public to know, from the allegorical descriptions of 

 the Chaldee MS., that there was a host of mighty creatures in the 

 service of the " man in plain apparel," conspicuous among which 

 were the " beautiful Leopard from the valley of the Palm trees," 

 and " the Scorpion which delighteth to sting the faces of men." As 

 for their leader, he was judiciously represented as a veiled person- 



* The early defects of the Magazine are nowhere better analyzed than by the very hands that 

 were chiefly engaged in the work. The authors of " Peter's Letters," after pointing out the 

 faults of the Edinburgh lievieic, go on to say : " These faults— faults thus at last beginning to be 

 seen by a considerable number of the old readers and admirers of the Edinburgh Review— seem 

 to have, been at the bottom of the aversion which the writers who established Blackwood's Ma- 

 gazine had against it; but their quarrel also included a very just disapprobation of the un- 

 patriotic mode of considering the political events of the times adopted all along by the Review, 

 and also of its occasional irreligious mockeries, borrowed from the French philosophy, or soi- 

 disant philosophy of the last age. Their great object seems to have been to break up the mo- 

 nopoly of influence which had long been possessed by a set of persons guilty of perverting, in 

 so many ways, talents on all hands acknowledged to be great. And had they gone about the ex- 

 ecution of their design with as much candor and good feeling as would seem to have attended 

 the conception of it, I have little doubt they would very soon have procured a mighty host of 

 readers to go along with them in all their conclusions. But the persons who are supposed to have 

 taken the lead in directing the new forces, wanted many of those qualities which were most ne- 

 cessary to insure success to their endeavors ; and they possessed others which, although in them- 

 selves admirably fitted for enabling them to conduct their project successfully, tended, in the 

 manner in which they made use of them, to throw many unnecessary obstacles in their way. In 

 short, they were very young, or very inexperienced men, who, although passionately fond of lit- 

 erature, and even well skilled in many of its finest branches, were by no means accurately ac- 

 quainted with the structure and practice of literature as it exists at this day in Britain. . . . 

 They approached the lists of literary warfare with the spirit at bottom of true knights ; but they 

 had come from the woods and the cloisters, and not from the cities and haunts of active men, and 

 they had armed themselves, in addition to their weapons of the right temper, with many other 

 weapons of ofl'ence, which, although sanctioned in former times by the practice of the heroes in 

 whose repositories they had found them rusting, had now become utterly exploded, and were re- 

 garded, and justly regarded, as entirely unjustifiable and disgraceful by all who surveyed with 

 modern eyes the arena of their exertions." 



