Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

418 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
miration for your ' Maga/ page 147 of ' Coleridge on the Consti-
tution according to the Idea ' (/ hope you Jmve received the copy
of the 2nd edition, which I ordered to be sent to you), you will not
suspect me of any want of zeal for you and yours if I say that
First, I have looked carefully over the bond, as Shylock
says, and can nowhere find that any approach to omniscience
on the part of your correspondent had been promised or stipu-
lated for : and, verily, something very like it he must be supposed
to possess, before it can be naturally required of him
that he should be cognizant of every tale and novelette, in
whatever vehicle and under whatever name, published during
the last twenty years, or even the last five, when we have had
such a rank crop of them that have beggared geography to
furnish them with distinct names, in one volume or two, or
three, besides annuals, and monthlies, and weeklies, that even
novelty itself seems flat, and curiosity turns yellow at the sight
of a Hungarian or a Californian tale, as an alderman under
the horrors of surfeit might be supposed to do at a Scotch
haggis steaming up against him ; all short of this impracticable
Bibliography, all that your correspondent could be expected or
had undertaken to do, he assuredly did. His orders to his
foreign correspondent were to send works fresh from the press,
or recently published. Kruse is a popular novelist, to whose
previous publications my friend was no stranger, and from the
title-page of the volume itself a man must be a conjuror to
have conceived any suspicion that there had been an earlier
edition, or that the contents had appeared in another form.
But as this letter ahoiU myself was intended for yourself
alone, while the other paper which states in a somewhat less
rambling and unbusiness-like style my sentiments on the point
in question will probably be communicated to you through
your correspondent, I will only add two points which seem
to me worth considering. 1st. That your correspondent has,
to my knowledge, spared neither trouble nor expense to procure
the best information from foreigners of good taste, and
the earliest arrival of the books well spoken of, and that from
his former command, and his existing personal connections
with the Continent, he possesses more than ordinary facilities.
Further, that he is a man of talent and a neat stylist, you
: