Page:The Southern Literary Messenger - Minor.djvu/106

This page has been validated.
92
The Southern

nati and there gratified his ambition as orator and author.

Now we come to "Riego, or the Spanish Martyr, a Play in five acts," by the celebrated Judge John Robertson, who kept his pet secret for many years. At last, whilst he was preparing a new and revised edition, he dropped a proof sheet, which fortunately was found and handed to him by a particular friend. He bound that friend to silence and it was several years yet ere it leaked out that one so highly distinguished in law and politics had such a penchant for poetry and the stage. At one time he had strong hopes that his Riego would be put upon the boards by Mr. Boucicault, of New York.

The "Genealogy of Ideas" is from the fertile brain and facile pen of Edward Win. Johnston, who was so well known as a correspondent of the National Intelligencer. He was brought to Richmond to edit the Daily Whig, but literature was more his forte than politics. Before the great internecine war, he removed to Missouri and was for several years the learned librarian of the Mercantile Library of St. Louis. He was a brother of Gen. Jos. E. Johnston and I often met him in St. Louis.

Blackwood's Magazine had made a vituperative attack upon our peerless Washington and, of course, he is heartily defended. Washington