Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

258 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
1815, and on that event gave up his idle and enjoy-
able life of love, poetry, and athletic amusement in
the Lake Country, and came to Edinburgh, already a
married man, with young children to provide for, to
work for his living, not very well knowing how. He
was called to the Scottish bar, but there was so little
meaning in that ceremonial in his case that he is said,
when he found by chance a brief on his table, to have
contemplated it with whimsical alarm, wondering
what the devil he was to do with it ! He soon found
something, however, to do with his leisure, or rather
with that mysterious and inappreciable portion of his
time in which he did his work. It must be added
that there never seems to have been anything like
poverty, or the usual struggle for life common to
ruined men, in his experience at this early period.
He came to Edinburgh, not to any restricted exist-
ence, but to his mother's ample and comfortable
house ; and was evidently able to wait without any
great strain until occupation and income came. In
1817, as has been already told, he and Lockhart— by
that time his inseparable friend and companion, much
younger in years but always more mature in soul
flung themselves into the creation of ' Blackwood's
Magazine,' in which both found the most congenial
work, and the opportunity for which both were un-
consciously waiting. Its first eflect was certainly
anything but a conciliatory one upon the temper of
the town or its authorities, and it is with a sense of
courage almost as reckless as if the bailies of Edinburgh
had been so many Oxford bargees (extinct as
adversaries, and known no more to the less muscular
—