Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

186 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
tently the supreme chair—one number sometimes in
one man's charge, sometimes in another's, now one
judgment uppermost and now another, but the veto
always in Blackwood's hands, even in the few months
when the influence of Murray made itself felt, and
bound down a very independent and high - spirited
group of men to an unwilling and rare compliance with
rule and formula which was quite against their nature.
A few letters from Lockhart addressed to a " Welsh
clergyman of the name of Williams," who was, I am
told, the brother of Archdeacon Williams, afterwards
for a number of years headmaster of the Edinburgh
Academy, were printed in several numbers of the
'London Scotsman'—an extinct paper—in May 1868,
and throw a great deal of light upon the situation.
The first is in the usual tone employed by all the
members of the triumvirate to possible contributors,
frank and even eager acceptance of proposed articles
from everybody supposed to possess talent or learning
(especially the latter, on which the two Oxford men
were strong, evidently troubled by the absence of
scholarship which they found in Edinburgh on their
return thither)—which enthusiasm of welcome, how-
ever, did not hinder, or even modify, the relentless re-
jection of such articles when not approved. Lockhart
informs his Welsh friend that the articles he proposes
are " exactly of the kind most wanted by
Blackwood : for we can get enough of jokes and
criticisms—to be sure far from the best in their way
sometimes : but in this country-town of ours, which
you are pleased to call by a fairer name than it
deserves, by far the greatest rarities are information
worthy of being so called and learning of any hind"