Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

MR CROKEH'S CRITICISM. 473
any want of wit. It is amusing to contrast with
these the following piece of criticism from the sharp
pen of the man who, being himself one of the literary-
celebrities of the period, has left almost the least ami-
able impression behind him of any writer of his time.
From both sides this Very important Personage in his
generation has been done to death, or rather has been
exhibited in all his cleverness and bitterness and
officialism as a man for whom there was no milk of
human kindness to spare. It was natural, perhaps, in
those days when Whigs and Tories were ever at each
other's throats, and even so mild and genial a man as
William Blackwood spoke of his opponents as " the
cursed Whigs," that Macaulay should cut to pieces in
his most incisive way his political antagonist. But
that the same individual should also be assailed in the
house of his friends, and set up as an image of scorn
in that house for the warning and edification of future
generations, was a hard fate. It is, accordingly, with
a sense of pleasure that we place before the reader
the only sour and discontented sentence we have met
with, as from the pen of Croker. He was one of
those to whom Mr Blackwood had sent his cherished
Magazine almost from the beginning, and it had been
a great pleasure to the Edinburgh publisher to make
the acquaintance of so brilliant and rising a man
when he passed through Edinburgh some time before.
There was great amity between them, and an occa-
sional exchange of good offices, nor is there any sign
that Mr Croker's frankness aroused feelings of re-
sentment,—though his ' Maga '
was to Mr Blackwood
as the apple of his eye, and any reflection upon her
much worse to him than if his own character had been
assailed.