Prince's Street, it was prophesied, would be haunted by their ghosts. The few spectres that ventured thither, O'Doherty tumbled neck and heels into the Balaam-Box, where they were laid as effectually as in the Red Sea. At such enormities as these the public could not but simper, and the names of the slain were soon wiped as effectually from the memories of all mankind, as chalk-writings on the walls of houses by the sponges of the police. "Mention the names of the gentlemen whom you blame us for having murdered," and the answer uniformly was, "Their names, Christopher?-Why we have forgotten their names." "Hold your tongue, then; for a murder, without the Christian and surname of the defunct, is not worth mentioning before ears polite." But our humanity in all this was most exemplary— for our murders were all metaphorical-and we had merely driven a number of our fellow-creatures from the folly, shame, and exposure of a life of literary prostitution, into the necessity of gaining an honest livelihood in compting-houses, upon wharfs, and in agriculture.

There was another class of writers, (we mention no names,) who had long been prodigiously overrated by themselves and their party. Merit they had, and we allowed it; but not one of them all was a Phoenix or a Phenomenon of any sort, and we took the liberty of speaking of them as if they were mere men, of various sizes, some with wigs and some without wigs, and all comprehended within the Bills of Mortality. This, too, gave offence, as it was meant to do. A man hates to be undeifiedto be reduced to the ranks of humanity. These persons were bitter against us, but it would not do. They felt it henceforth to be up-hill work, and accepted their proper level as we laid it down. Nay, by and by, they absolutely grew into contributors, (rejected ones of course,) and inundated the Blue-Parlour with articles that could have lighted all the cigars in Edinburgh. What has become of most of these distinguished literary characters now, we have sometimes puzzled ourselves in conjecturing; but we would fain hope that they have died in the course of nature of a good old age.

But the living literature of England, thank God, is of a glorious spirit. Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and others, are men to stand undiminished-undwindled, by the

side of the giants of the olden time. They too had, one and all of them, been insulted equally by the abuse and by the panegyric of pigmies. Praise wës absolutely doled out to these illustrious writers, with the most stately eleemosynary airs, by critics in the last stage of mental famine and starvation. The prating coxcombs did not bend their little insignificant knees before the image which they pretended and presumed to idolise, but they strutted up in self-worship, with an old stump of a pen behind their ears, and laid their small articles of oblation on the shrine -articles that never could be made to take fire, but evaporated in a stink of smoke most offensive to Apollo.

Then, like savages, they grew angry with their gods, if their invocations were not heard, and positively abused the very objects of their former idolatry; forgetting, however, that, in their cases, they could not pull down what they had not set up, and that nature guarded the sons and daughters of genius. True it is, that the worst and basest passions alternately tore the hearts of critics in their abject superstitions; and that their works are a perfect chaos of unshaped thought and feeling, presenting a wonderful and melancholy contrast with those ordered creations that had provoked their spleen, their envy, or their admiration. Out of the hands, or rather the paws, of such worthless worshippers, we took the office of Priest to the Muses. We hailed the sunrise of genius with very different strains. We inspired men with that spirit in which alone genius can be known, felt, or We attended the car of its triumphs, to clear the way, and to swell the hymn. Without enthusiasm-without something of the same transport that seizes on the poet's soul-what signify the imperfect sympathies of the critic? The due expression of delight awaked in sincere hearts by the glories of genius must be eloquent. That delight does not speak in short, measured, precise, analytical sentences, nor yet in the long-winded ambulatory parade of paragraphs circuitously approaching, against all nature and all art, to a catastrophical climax. But thoughts that breathe, and words that burn, break from the critic's lips who is worthy of his bard; and his prose panegyric is, in body and in soul-itself a poem.

seen.

It is thus we have ever spoken, and ever will speak, of the Magnates of Parnassus. Yet should any one-even of them-be led

astray, not "by the light from heaven," but by the coruscations of his own clouded and tempestuous genius, it is well known how we have ever stood affected towards the glorious but dangerous delinquent. Remember how we bearded Byron in his Den -ay, at a time when all the puny whipsters stood aloof trembling, and feared to breathe a whisper, lest the Childe should grasp them in his ire, flog, flay, and anatomize. WE ALONE met him hand to hand, and, in the Open Ring of Europe, challenged the mighty wrestler to try a fall. Much was said of our presumption, and more, as usual, of our personality—that weary watchword of the weak and wicked-and the trembling cowards cried, "Shame, shame, to abuse Byron !" But Byron thought otherwise. He knew that his match was before him; and although Byron feared no man's face, yet we know he respected our bearing on that occasion.

Nor let it be said that, either on this or any other occasion, the moral Satyrists in this Magazine ever wished to remain unknown. How, indeed, could they wish for what they well knew was impossible? All the world has all along known the names of the gentlemen who have uttered our winged words. Nor did it ever, for one single moment, enter into the head of any one of them to wish-not to scorn concealment. To gentlemen, too, they at all times acted like gentlemen; but was it ever dreamt by the wildest visionary that they were to consider as such the scum of the earth? "If I but knew who was my slanderer," was at one time the ludicrous skraigh of the convicted Cockney. Why did he not ask? and what would he have got by asking? Shame and confusion of face-unanswerable argument and cruel chastisement. For before one word would have been deigned to the sinner, he must have eaten-and the bitter roll is yet ready for him-all the lies he had told for the last twenty years, and must either have choked or been kicked-no pleasing alternative. But why thus bastinado the Specimensthey are but stuffed skins.

But there is yet another class of writers, of our conduct respecting whom, permit us to say a very few words. We mean youthful aspirants after literary fame. Let them show either taste, or feeling, or genius-much or little-and have they not all found us their friends? They are overlooked by the world-What is

that to us? If they have any lustre, they are soon discerned by us, be they glow-worms or stars, and their place pointed out in heaven or on earth. Perhaps they are so very unfashionable, that their volumes never get farther than the servant's hall. What is that to us, if the volumes have any merit? Show us either promise or performance, and without any appearance of patronage, which is the mere triumph of pride over humility, we address the writer in terms of friendly encouragement and inspiriting commendation. We have the pure satisfaction of knowing that we have been of substantial service to several persons of merit in this way: and without wishing to misrepresent the character of any one of our Contemporaries, we simply ask, which of them have treated unobtrusive and modest merit with half the kindness of that bloody-minded hobgoblin-Blackwood's Magazine ?

With some two or three writers of more than ordinary genius, or talent, or taste, we alone have dealt either with common sense or common feeling. We may mention three-Keats, Shelley, Procter. Keats possessed from nature some "fine powers," and that was the very expression we used in the first critique that ever mentioned his name. We saw, however, with mixed feelings of pity, sorrow, indignation, and contempt, that he was on the road to ruin. He was a Cockney, and Cockneys claimed him for their own. Never was there a young man so encrusted with conceit. He added new treasures to his mother-tongue,and what is worse, he outhunted Hunt in a species of emasculated pruriency, that, although invented in Little Britain, looks as if it were the product of some imaginative Eunuch's muse within the melancholy inspiration of the Harem. Besides, we know that the godless gang were flattering him into bad citizenship, and wheedling him out of his Christian faith. In truth, they themselves broke the boy's heart, and blasted all his prospects. We tried to save him by wholesome and severe discipline -they drove him to poverty, expatriation, and death. //Then they howled out murder against, first the Quarterly Review, and then this Magazine. Heartless slaves! Did not John Hunt himself, even Prince John, publish, for the sake of filthy lucre, Byron's cutting sarcasms on poor Keats, after he was in his grave? Nay, did he not publish Byron's outrageous merriment

on this very charge of murder ?-an instance of heartless effrontery unparalleled since the Age of Bronze?

We remember-we believe it was in John Scott's abuse of ushaving it particularly bandied against us as a heinous crime that we had ventured to hint that Keats was an apothecary, and been jocose on his pestle and mortar. A sad offence! These people must be quite new in the world of wit. We thought all these common-places of quizzing were perfectly understood, and of course harmless. From long prescription in this style of writing, a lawyer is a rogue-a physician kills his patients-a parson has a round paunch-an alderman guttles and guzzles-an attorney is an arrant knave—and so on. What man of the least sense in these eminent professions, takes offence at these threadbare jests? Some of our jesters, it appears, could not resist the revival of the union of poetry and pharmacy in John Keats, as they had existed in Apollo, and made sorry jokes thereupon. But for the spirit of exaggeration which has attended everything connected with our Magazine, this never would have been considered as an offence. It was set down as a most grievous one by the same party who were calling Dr Phillpotts (one of the most accomplished men in England) a foul-mouthed parson, and cracking jokes on Wordsworth for being a stamp-master,-Wordsworth, who, independently of his unequalled genius, is by birth, education, character, and independence, precisely the man best fitted to hold in any country an office of trust and responsibility, and of such moderate emolument as suits and satisfies the wishes of a Poet and Philosopher.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a man of far superior powers to Keats. He had many of the faculties of a great poet. He was, however, we verily believe it now, scarcely in his right mind. His errors in private life had been great, but not prodigious, as the Quarterly Review represented them; and they brought evils along with them which Shelley bore with fortitude and patience. He had many noble qualities; and thus gifted, thus erring, and thus an outcast, we spoke of him with kindness and with praise. He felt, and gratefully acknowledged both; and was proud to know, that some of the articles in our work on his poetry, were written by a poet whose genius he admired and imitated. How did the Cockneys swallow our praises of Shelley ?-As wormwood.