Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

184 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
of dropping into Blackwood's establishment in Princes
Street, of which one of them a few years later gave
a delightful description in ' Peter's Letters to his
Kinsfolk':—
You have an oval saloon lighted from the roof, where various
groups of loungers and dilettanti are engaged in looking at or
criticising among themselves the publications just arrived by
that day's post from town. In such critical colloquies the
voice of the bookseller may ever and anon be heard mingling
the broad and unadulterated tones of its Auld Eeekie music
for unless occupied in the recesses of his premises with some
other business, it is here that he has his usual station. He is
a nimble, active-looking man of middle age, and moves about
from one corner to another with great alacrity, and apparently
under the influence of high animal spirits. His complexion is
very sanguineous, but nothing could be more intelligent, keen,
and sagacious than the expression of his whole physiognomy
above all the grey eyes and eyebrows, as full of locomotion as
those of Catalani.
The young man who, when he had become a literary
personage by the agency of the Magazine, wrote the
above, had the best of reasons for appreciating the gen-
erous publisher who began to influence his life from
his very first appearance in Edinburgh. Lockhart
was a linguist, an elegant accomplishment rather
than a necessity of education in his day ; and knew
German, then only beginning to come into favour as
a storehouse of literature : and it was his eager desire
to go to Germany to complete his knowledge, and
with the view of translating something by way of
paying his expenses. Mr Blackwood evidently from
the first had believed in the youth, and it was he who
furnished the funds for the journey. He lent, or it
would be more true to say gave, a sum which, we
;