Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

138 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
vealed to the world. To make it all the more wonderful,
Murray was the publisher of the poem, in which
Blackwood either had a share, or, as the agent of
Murray, pushed and sold, much exhorted so to do by
his friends in London.
Finally, we believe Mr Leigh Hunt's injured feelings
were calmed down, and that, with various answering
bursts of abuse in his paper, the * Examiner,' the
quarrel went on in an appropriate and legitimate way
but it made a breach between Blackwood and the firm
of Baldwin & Cradock, whose pious horror at being
concerned in such a row, and anxiety that the world
should be made aware how very little they had to do
with it, are edifying beyond expression. Their name
disappears from the November (1817) number of the
Magazine ; but the articles on the Cockney School of
poetry went on bravely, and the name stuck, if noth-
ing else. Z's articles, however, in the succeeding
numbers are in better, or at least in less bad taste,
and consequently much more effective than that in the
first, which, while exceedingly abusive, was not brilliant,
though every supporter of the Magazine was
ready to go to the stake for its talent at least, if
nothing else. It is most curious to find the light
rhymes and trivial strains of the ' Story of Bimini
solemnly treated, as if it might upset the morals of
the world, with accusations which are not less than
horrible attached to its insignificant details. But the
eyesight of contemporaries is so curiously out of focus
that it is impossible to overestimate its strange tendency
to confuse all perspective. In one portion of
these strictures, coming from so capable a critic, who
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