Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/250

214 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD. the Lake school of poets, with whom he sooii threw in his fortune. After the publication of the "Isle of Palms," and the " City of the Plague," he joined the Scotch Bar, and in the Parliament House struck up an acquaintance with another briefless barrister -Lock- hart, seven years younger than himself, John Gibbon Lockhart was also educated at Glas- gow University, where gaining the " Snell " founda- tion, he was sent, at sixteen, to Balliol ; after taking a first-class degree he travelled on the Continent, re- turning only when it was necessary to enter at Edin- burgh as an advocate, Silent in private life, he found he could not speak at all in public; and many years afterwards, when making a speech at a farewell din- ner, given in honour of his departure to undertake the editorship of the Quarterly, he broke down, as usual, and stuttered, " Gentlemen, you know I can't make a speech ; if I could, we shouldn't be here." Briefless both, and both endowed with strong literary tastes, they became sworn friends, though Wilson, with his splendid physique, his loose-flowing yellow hair, his deep-blue eyes, his glowing imagination, his eloquent tongue, and his defiance of all precedent, was as opposite a being as well could be imagined to Lockhart, who, to borrow Wilson's own words, had " an e'e like an eagle's, and a sort of lauch about the screwed-up mouth o' him that fules ca'd nae canny, for they couldna tholl the meaning o't ; and either set dumb-foundered, or pretended to be engaged to sooper, and slunk out o' the room." With two such men as these it was little wonder that Blackwood resolved to continue the battle. The weapon, however, which had been so successfully used in the onslaught upon the Edinburgh Revieiv became