Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

390 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
to the most atrocious calumnies or downright insults, we are
denounced as not conciliatory. If you had a drop of the old
wranglesome Antiburgher blood in your veins, it would boil
if you were treated as we are. Look at a playhouse riot con-
strued into high treason; or a conspiracy of the Protestants
(a body of men as numerous as the population of Jutland) to
murder, with a huge quart bottle, as a Cork newspaper called it,
the representative of our most gracious king. Plunkett is
hunting down those dreadfully oppressed men, whom he has
attacked with the venom of a bloodhound, but he has missed
his quarry. I hope his turn will come some time or other ; if
we fight, many a bullet is at his service. In a word, the
question is now narrowed to this—Is the Protestant religion to
be tolerated in Ireland ? And the end will be that England
will have to conquer the country again, which consummation I
hope most devoutly to witness. But what is this long mess of
Irish politics to you ? Not a pinsworth ; but all men's minds
here are so full of the posture of affairs that we can scarce
dream of anything else.
And here is a piece of sage advice which must have
come well from a comparatively new man. It refers
to a supposed quarrel with Gait, in which Maginn
opines with complimentary censure that Blackwood
must be in the wrong— "for you are a man of sense
and he a blockhead, with whom a man of sense should
never quarrel."
It is probable that in a tradesman point of view you will lose
little by not publishing ' Eingan Gilhaize,' for G. is writing too
fast. Even Waverley himself is going it too strong on us, and
he is a leetle better trump than Gait. However, do not let
anything ever so little harsh appear against it in ' Maga.' I
shall review it for you, if you like, praising it and extracting
the greatest trash to be found in it as specimens to bear out my
panegyric. G. will swallow it. In one thing you were decidedly
wrong ; you ought not to have allowed him to get so thorough
an insight into the method of managing the Magazine. Henceforward
admit no other partner into the concern. With W.