Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

196 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
more elegant language, and one more romantic and
gentlemanlike, according to the fancy of the time.
He was indeed a very Proteus of literary capacity,
and could disport himself within the covers of one
Magazine under half-a-dozen different characters.
His wonderful powers of work have already been
remarked. He idled or seemed to idle through the
day, absorbed in the cheerful nothings of a young
man's life in town, and probably went home late like
the rest of his kind, but all the same had his sheet
ready for the Magazine next morning. Nerves were
happily unknown in those days. Men feared overwork
as little as they feared writer's cramp, an ex-
quisite malady which was almost epidemic a short
while ago, but now seems happily to have died out
of fashion again.
After the commotion of the immediate beginning,
the new periodical went on with great vigour, asserting
by all its mouths, for the satisfaction of Mr Murray
and other fastidious persons, that the "personalities"
had come to an end, and that henceforward its pro-
gress was to be virtuous beyond all the usual requirements
of virtue. Murray dropped off, as we have
seen, perhaps with but a limited confidence in those
promises, perhaps for other reasons ; but we can
scarcely pretend that the personalities did cease. The
Cockney School continued to be the object of un-
sparing attack, and other opponents arose, natural
foes of the Tory band, natural rivals for the public
approval. There was a raid against the ' Scots-
man,' the well - known Edinburgh paper, which then
was laying the foundations of its great popularity,
and which being as Whig as Blackwood was Tory,