Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

192 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
the sole trace existing, so far as I am aware, of any
arrangement of the kind : and my instinctive idea on
reading it was that it must have been a temporary
plan of Murray's, who loved to do things formally and
in order, and to whose ideas an editor would be as
necessary for a Magazine as a handle to a door. I
have ascertained since that this was precisely the
fact. Murray's partnership with Blackwood lasted,
however, as the reader has seen, for six months
only, and this engagement produced nothing but the
already quoted letter inserted in our last chapter from
these two responsible (though so completely irrespon-
sible) persons, whom Blackwood calls " our friends,"
and who ran wilder riot than ever, as far as they
could, while in their temporary authority. They
never got the money, I am told, thus promised
—
(at all events both denied strenuously in after life
having ever received a penny for editorial work)
and I do not think that even for these six months
they were ever free from the silent authority behind
backs, who indeed permitted a great deal to their
audacity, but not all.
Lockhart's proposal that his correspondent should
make amusing papers on the Fathers, and their rare
views of society and manners, is a wonderful sug-
gestion ;
and the idea of the Welsh divine searching
for fun and frolic in the pages of the ' Acta Sanc-
torum,' of which he could easily procure copies, is
more amusing and original than we fear the papers
would have been. Our young man is never elsewhere
so young, so elated, or so important as in
this curious scrap of correspondence. I am sorry
there is no more of it.