Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

I
SECESSION OF MURRAY. 173
of them to me as heretofore, although he has received every
work that I have published, in the true spirit of the under-
standing in which we parted. In fact, it is he who has withdrawn
his business and agency from me.
I am fully sensible of the fairness of your judgment and of
the correctness of your feelings ; and to these I can in safety
appeal, if you will abstract yourself from other considerations
and will ask this broad question. Whether that man can be
wholly in the wrong, or can have entertained any bad feeling
towards your brother, who has for more than ten years poured
into his business all the credit and advantages of a series of the
most respectable and fortunate publications that have appeared?
What these advantages must have been, you may form some
estimate of when I say that the agency of such a book as
' Marriage ' produces £50 in the course of a year ; and such, I
think, no man of business can deny to be an object of attention.
In fact, we have never had any dispute before the appearance
of a Magazine which has involved every one connected with it
in alternate anxiety, disgrace, and misery.
From this point the fateful periodical which was to
make Blackwood's name and his fortune was subject,
even in the smallest share, to no stranger's control.
Henceforward, anxious but indomitable, holding in
his Pegasus as well as he could, sometimes permitting
himself to be run away with, sometimes pulling up hard
with a great effort, but always steady as a rock to his
engagements, his opinions, and his friends, William
Blackwood stood alone to take all the risks and fight
all the battles. And that his life was full of agitation,
and the struggle a hard one, there can be no doubt.
To show what he had to undergo we take up with
a thrill of sympathy, which nowadays cannot but be
mixed with amusement, three letters, all by the hands
most renowned in Edinburgh, and representing the
elite of the literary world, the last of the former gen-