Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

LITERARY GOSSIP. 499
Archdeacon Nares still continues covertly to edit Kemington's
dull mass of orthodoxy, the ' British Critic' The ' Monthly
and ' British Critic ' have been nicknamed Micmpsimus and
Sumpsimus. They do not seem to improve a whit.
The ' Eclectic ' is managed by Josiah Conder, late bookseller of
St Paul's Churchyard. He writes all his poetical articles (some
of which are by no means contemptible) himself. Montgomery
usually furnishes one paper monthly for this work : its circula-
tion is about 3000. There is a great deal of black bigotry and
cant in its pages. But all Dissenting works have many readers.
These notes run on to an interminable length, and it
is impossible to follow them, except in scraps. The
gossip was all precious to the compounders of the
short papers, the essayists on Things in General,
which the Magazine has always loved, and especially
to the framers of the ' Noctes,' after it was estab-
lished, when the merest anecdote was enough to set
the wheel of conversation going. " The production of
Lord Byron's," which was " handed about among the
duly initiated Thebans of Holland House," and which
mocked at the king's visit to Ireland in " a blasphemous
parody of the advent of our Saviour " ; the
identification of the author of another of these squibs
as "Lady Morgan's gentle Knight, Sir Charles" ; the
alarming decrease in the circulation of Colburn's
Magazine, on every number of which he lost largely,
notwithstanding the most heroic puffing ;
the success
of another periodical because of the little or no ex-
pense of its production, the contributors being all
unpaid,— these were all of the greatest interest to
the eager publisher in Edinburgh. Among these
scraps of information and gossip the ever-recurring
advices about advertisements, and the need of keeping
up relations with the newspapers, came in as a chorus
'