Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

108 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
lating all the arguments, which Mr Blackwood wrote
to Mr Combe, the agent of the editors, apparently
under the immediate sting of a paper printed by
them, and containing a very unfair account of the
proceedings from the beginning. It is dated 29th
October 1817:—
W. Blackwood to Mr Gomhe.
You have seen from the correspondence that it was my most
anxious wish to settle with your clients as speedily as the
accounts could be made out; that I furnished the accounts
within a very few days after the sixth number was published,
and in my letter enclosing them, offered to send my clerk to
settle the whole at any time they chose ; that in place of their
agreeing to this, your clients still wanted a reference, when
there was in fact nothing to refer; that after plaguing both
themselves and me by insisting I should not name any other
than a bookseller as my referee, they at last empowered you
to send me a scroll on Tuesday last of the submission,^ by
which we were to refer all matters in dispute to the gentlemen
whom I had originally proposed—on my part Mr More,
and on their part Mr Brownlee. Yesterday I called upon
you, and stated what I had proposed all along,—that if your
clients would allow my clerk to call upon them, or if they
would empower you to act for them, I was quite certain
that the whole might be settled in a quarter of an hour.
You received my proposal in the most candid manner,
and after conversing over the matter a little, you agreed
with me in thinking this by far the best mode for both
parties. Accordingly you called upon me in the course of
the forenoon with a proposal from your clients that I should
pay them £300 for their half share of the property and any
claims they might afterwards have upon the Magazine. I
told you at once that this was entirely out of the question, and
I showed you clearly by the statements of sales and expenses
that I was at present nearly £140 out of pocket, so that there
^ A Scotch law-term, meaning the legal statement of details in a case.