Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

386 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
the formula of these kinder days) had noted on a visit
"your fine family of boys," and inquired, which was
also a kind formula, what the father meant to do with
them, with friendly impulses of help going through
the mind. In this case it was, I think, Mrs Hughes,
the wife of a Canon of St Paul's, a frequent visitor to
Scotland, a friend of Sir Walter, and finally, as the
height of perfection, the grandmother, I believe, of
our beloved Tom Brown ^ of Rugby and Oxford, Judge
Hughes of the present day—who asked the question ;
and probably on hearing that the boy's inclinations
pointed towards the army, this lady, on her return
to London, exerted herself to get a cadetship for
the young Willie. In another chapter we shall see
with what anxious love his father watched over the
early career of this boy. His University was the old
strange world of India, the long monotony of the
career so unlike that of the present day, when a
young man thinks nothing of skipping over land and
sea for a holiday of six weeks with his people. Young
William did not return for more than twenty years,
and never saw his father again.
The following letter was written after Maginn's
return to Cork, and gives a glimpse of the more seri-
ous studies by which he meant to secure a blaze of
reputation for his formal entry upon the world. His
scholarship of the more usual kind was already the
admiration of his Scottish friends :
Dr Maginn to W. Blackwood.
—
Nov. 12, 1821.
The accounts of the disturbances in the South of Ireland are
in general much exaggerated, and the comments of the English
^ Still living at the time these words were written.