LITERATURE. — BLACKWOOD^ MAGAZINE. 193 



" Sunday Evening. 



" My deak Wilsox : — I trust you will forgive me for addressing 

 you on a subject which has been running in nay head all week, and 

 has incapacitated me, I believe, from reading or writing, for when- 

 ever I attempted either, your image, or the image of some other 

 person or thing connected with Blackwood's Magazine, immedi- 

 ately took its station in my brain, and prevented any other idea 

 from obtaining an entrance. 



" I have frequently thought of writing to you, yet I have always 

 drawn back, from an aversion to appear to be giving advice or 

 intermeddling in an affair with which I have nothing to do, separate 

 from the interest which every one who knows you must take in 

 you. I hear, however, that you have called on me to-day, and I 

 cannot any longer refrain from saying something to you, though 

 perhaps it may be rather incoherent, on the unpleasant circumstan- 

 ces of the last week. That blame must attach to you and your 

 friend Lockhart for the delinquencies of Blackwood's Magazine I 

 am afraid must be admitted ; but even if the blame should not go 

 the full length of the accusations which are made against you, I 

 have myself too distinct a conception of the hazards accompanying 

 mysterious and secret composition, and the temptations which it 

 throws in the way of men of imagination and genius (much inferior 

 to either of yours), that I can conceive, in the heat of writing, your 

 trespassing very much upon the limits of propriety or a due re- 

 gard for the common courtesies and regulations of social life. As 

 it is impossible, too, for another person to enter into all the feelings 

 which may have actuated you on different occasions, I can imagine 

 that you may have done what you are stated to have done, with- 

 out deserving those imputations which have been thrown upon 

 you. Indeed I cannot, for my own part, think any thing very bad 

 of you. You have always appeared to me a person of high and 

 noble character, and I should be very sorry to view you in any 

 other light. I am not at all, however, surprised that torrents of 

 abuse should be thrown upon you, both in private and public, and 

 I cannot say that the world is unjust in this retaliation. 



" The person who has written the anonymous letter to you does 

 not act perhaps in the most chivalrous manner possible, not to let 

 himself be known ; but I rather think he is in the right, and as I 

 am one of those people who are disposed to believe all things, I 



