Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

124 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
complaint, as we shall afterwards see, the Lords of
Session were called upon to listen, and whose re-
capitulation, in the terms of the law, of the missile
aimed at him is even more grotesquely comic than the
libel itself
This assault upon all and sundry gave the delighted
conspirators an amount of pleasure in the concocting
which ought to have fully indemnified them for any
trouble afterwards. They awaited with impatience the
clearing out of their predecessors, and the coming of
that jovial October that should launch them upon the
world which they meant to take by storm. In some-
thing of the same mind they compiled a list as long
as a man's arm of articles on every subject under the
sun, which were preparing, as they promised, and
which it would have taxed an army of trained men of
letters to produce. But they were confident in their
power to do anything, and perhaps the dashing bravado,
after all, was more genuine than appeared. " Wilson,"
says Mr E,. P. Gillies—himself a contributor—in his
' KecoUections of a Literary Veteran,' " instead of
desiring good Mr Pringle's stores of reserved copy,
very decisively maintained that any man in a state
of tolerable health, and disposed for literary amuse-
ment, might write an entire number in the course of
two days ! He had then a rapidity of executive power
in composition such as I have never seen equalled
before nor since. But as he would do nothing but
when he liked and how he liked, his productions,
whether serious or comic, might all be regarded as
mere jeux d'esprit and matters of amusement. Mr
Lockhart, I suppose, was more systematic in his pur-