Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

THE CHALDEE MANUSCRIPT. 117
come a very vague and general knowledge. When we
say that it concerned chiefly the quarrel between Mr
Blackwood and the two editors who had wrecked his
little Magazine and disappointed his hopes, and the
larger strife and rivalry which existed between Con-
stable and himself, one Edinburgh bookseller against
another, along with the background of people, notable,
yet only in one case world-distinguished, who
took part on either side, the young reader may well
be astonished that so much has been written of this
production. Yet it is not too much to say that in
its way it moved the world, and that readers who
had never heard of half the characters in it, and to
whom the personal peculiarities of the various men in
Edinburgh who appeared in its scenes were altogether
unknown, laughed and stormed, and disapproved, and
grew solemn in reproof and denunciation, and laughed
again— till the original little brown-covered brochure
of the new periodical was totn in pieces by eager
buyers and clamorous critics, and ' Blackwood's Maga-
zine ' leaped all at once into the knowledge, the curi-
osity, and the attention of the book-loving world. It
was, perhaps, not the firmest of foundations, but it was
a most efiectual one. Edinburgh rose to it like one
man, delighted, amused, oflended, furious. Whatever
after-criticism might be expended upon it—and that
came pouring in on every side—this one thing was
assured from the first day : that it had done what it
was meant to do, and that whatever was to be said of
the new * Blackwood's Magazine,' which had risen with
such a shout out of the ashes of the old, this at least
could be said no longer, that it was dull or inoffensive
—which is of all criticism the most dreadful.