Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

A PAIR OF FRIENDS. 103
Lockhart was a caricaturist of no small powers.
Both of them were only too keen to see the ludicrous
aspect of everything, and the age gave them an
extraordinary licence in expressing it—a licence in-
comprehensible to us nowadays, and which is nowhere
so tempting, as it is' nowhere so dangerous, as in a
small community where everybody knows everybody,
and personal allusions are instantly taken up and
understood. This pair of friends met almost daily
in Mr Blackwood's saloon in Princes Street, or came
together arm-in-arm from the Parliament-House, in
their high collars and resplendent shirt -frills and
Hessian boots. The boots form a splendid feature in
the caricature-sketches, in which Lockhart represents
himself stiff and straight, with the little tassels
bobbing at his knees. Such was the costume of the
day, and such were the heroes of Edinburgh youth,
men of endless faculty and inextinguishable mirth,
men neither ungenial nor ungenerous, yet unable to
deny themselves a jest, and tempted to find in the
outcries of their victims rather a relish the more to
their sometimes cruel fun than an argument to give
it up.
With two such young men under his hand, ready
for anything—as astonishing in their bursts of energy
as in their boundless capacity for idling, and eager to
carry out any freak which promised sport—Blackwood
had naturally the strongest light by which to see the
shortcomings of his dull editors, who moulded pain-
fully under his vexed and impatient observation the
dullest of inconsequent Magazines, instead of the
brilliant organ he had dreamed of To think of these
mild men as leading a rival band to that of Jeffrey