Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

114 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
Magazine, though the work returned into Ballantyne's
hands in after-years.
The decks were now cleared, the men were at their
posts : the real battle was about to begin. One can
imagine the bustle and the commotion in the rooms in
Princes Street, the endless consultations, the wild
suggestions : Lockhart, pensive and serious, almost
melancholy, in the fiery fever of satire and ridicule
that possessed him, launching his javelin with a
certain pleasure in the mischief as well as the most
perfect self-abandonment to the impulse of the
moment ; Wilson, with Homeric roars of laughter,
and a recklessness still less under control, not caring
whom he attacked nor with what bitterness, apparently
unconscious of the sting till it was inflicted, when he
collapsed into ineffectual penitence ; Hogg bustling
in, all flushed and heated with a new idea, in which
the rustic daffing of the countryside gave a rougher
force to the keen shafts of the gentlemen. That it
must be a strong number, something to startle the
world, a sort of fiery meteor to blaze across the Edin-
burgh sky and call every man's attention, was the
first necessity. They were determined upon this,
whatever else might follow : no longer any calm of
respectable mediocrity—something to sting and startle,
and make every reader hold his breath. The position
of the publisher between those uncontrollable, high-
spirited, mirth-loving young men, who had taken
possession of him and his premises and his Magazine,
whose talents roused him into that enthusiasm of
which we have already seen him to be so capable,
and whose gay determination to make a stir in the
world was only as the foam upon the river to his own