Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

404 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
learned wisdom. Maginn's career in London was
neither happy nor respectable. He wrote for the
' John Bull ' and other papers, selling his praise or
his censure as it might be wanted, until both ceased
to be of any value. He became a hurried, irregular,
and harassed journalist, irregular in life as well as in
his profession, carrying the light-hearted satire and
fun of his youth into servility and miserable personal
abuse. He became the great prop of ' Eraser's Maga-
zine ' when
established, and there set up an imitated
' Noctes ' and Symposia of various kinds, written with
ease and ever a more reckless and flying pen, and less
regard (he had never shown much) to decency and
good manners. Maginn was the one among that joy-
ous band who paid the penalty of the follies which they
all more or less committed. He was the one to whom
these follies were not the wild oats of youth, but the
tares that choked all the good seed. Who can formulate
any moral from such a sad history, or say he was
more to blame than his peers ? He had all the gracious
qualities — a man lovable, generous, kind. But
that dismal deterioration, which is a more dreadful
consequence than even the inevitable ruin of life which
attends such a headlong career, at last separated from
him almost all his friends, whose correspondence is full
of regretful notes of the gradually accomplished down-
fall. In the letters of the younger Blackwoods during
the forties, he appears as a melancholy ghost coming
and going about the office in Pall Mall, an apparition
filling the young men with speechless horror and pity.
Yet ' Eraser's Magazine ' made him for a time the
centre of a new group, and might have given him
another chance ; and here he formed an acquaint-