Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/264

228 WILLIAM BLA CKWO OD. bedside to another. They never met again. Gait lingered on for years, but Blackwood died on the loth of September, 1834, in the fifty-seventh year of his age. We have already given his character as described by those who knew him best, and it were idle to add any weaker testimony. He left a widow and a family of seven sons and two daughters, many of them very yourig ; and the management of the business devolved upon the two elder, Robert and Alexander, who had for some years been associated with their father. Until 1845, these gentlemen were at the head of the flourishing business, and with such a start they could not fail to succeed. The magazine, in spite of all rivals, continued to be as great a favourite as ever, though in a year or so after the death of the elder Blackwocd, Wilson withdrew almost entirely from its pages, and his position was eventually occupied by his son-in-law, Professor Aytoun. Many new con- tributors, without distinction of sect or party, were added to the staff; and even Douglas Jerrold and Walter Savage Landor ultra-radicals, both were made free of its pages. John Sterling, " our new con- tributor," as Wilson fondly called him, fully retained the old reputation for deftciously sparkling poems and essays ; and Lord Lytton, in the " Poems and Ballads of Schiller," kept alive the cosmopolitan spirit of poetry inaugurated by Lockhart. In 1845, Alex- ander Blackwood died, and was shortly afterwards followed by his brother, when John, the third son, the present proprietor of the business and the present editor of Blackiuood, who was born in 1818, succeeded. So popular had Maga become in the colonies, and