Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

IDLE YOUNG MEN. 193
They were idle young men, and, according to all
the usual estimates, it was a rash thing to depend
upon them and their flighty exertions for the success
of a grave undertaking ; but Blackwood had a keen
eye for character, and divined his men more justly
than their fellows : be&ides, he had the very excep-
tional gift of influencing and guiding the unruly
Pegasus, which probably would not have gone soberly
in harness for any other man. They treated him
sometimes a little cavalierly, from that de haut en
has of education and conscious genius on which the
Oxford scholar, freshly issued from the mint of in-
tellectual superiority, is apt to feel himself elevated,
looking down upon the general world ; but they
acknowledged his power with more or less cordiality,
laughing at it sometimes and taking it as a good joke,
at other times straining against the curb, but on the
whole recognising the guidance with sufficiently good
grace, notwithstanding their self-will and the impet-
uosity of their natures. It would scarcely seem to
have been suspected by others that such coadjutors
were really and seriously to be trusted for steady
work. " They were so constantly employed," says
Mr E,. P. Gillies—himself afterwards a member of the
Blackwood band—in his ' Recollections of a Literary
Veteran,' "in giggling and making giggle, like Cowper
and Thurlow in another generation, that they seemed
to have no time for work." Lockhart, besides being
the greatest wit, was the caricaturist of the gay
party :
no one was safe from him, specially not him-
self, of whom he made prim sketches, in all the
stifl&iess of correct demeanour which veiled his wild
and headlong fancy. All the Edinburgh notabilities
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