Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

LOCKHART AND MURRAY. 169
Calumny Detected in a review of ' Blackwood's Edinburgh
Magazine,' " was published, in which Murraywas
brought in as well as the rest. It appears that
both he and Blackwood took this with equanimity,
and resolved to take no notice of it ; but Lockhart
and Wilson both sent challenges to the anonymous
writer through the publishers. This was not so fool-
ish or impossible a proceeding then as it would be
now, and it was not, unfortunately, Lockhart's only
experience of this kind ; but it was sufficiently absurd
even in those days, and especially from men who had
themselves dealt blows about them on every side,
besides being a complete and rash withdrawal of the
veil of mystery of which both before and after they
made so great a point. The matter is referred to in
a letter addi-essed to Mr Murray by Lockhart, who
begins by expressing the great pleasure given him by
a letter just shown to him by Blackwood, in which
Murray's satisfaction with the number for October
1818 is fully expressed. " Depend upon it, the succeed-
ing ones will have more of what you like and less of
what you dislike in it," he says. And he adds :
Lockhart to John Murray.
I speak as if nothing had happened ; and, after all, I myself
consider this vile pamphlet as nothing. Wilson has been a
good deal distressed about it, however; and we have, both
by writing to the Anonyme and by every other way in our
power, done our best to discover the writer. We trust in God
he may be MterrL My own suspicions rest on Graham (a
poor creature you can know nothing about), but Master Con-
stable must have furnished the information, and Master Pringle
has played the scoundrel to Wilson. . . . The foolish abuse
of your personal behaviour, in this pamphlet, cannot of course
at all trouble you for more than a single moment.
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