Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/241

205 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD. 205 coming change, and after much chaffering he was glad to pay 125 down, and get rid at once of them and the magazine ; and somewhat, doubtless, to his chagrin they immediately returned to Constable and took charge of the Scots Magazine, which, under the title of Constables Edinburgh Magazine, made a futile effort to re-juvenate itself. With the sixth number of the Edinburgh' Monthly Magazine had appeared a notice stating that "this work is now discontinued, this being the last number of it ;" but in the following month, with an alteration in the title, it arose, Phcenix-like, from the ashes, and, as BlackwoocPs Edinburgh Magazine, No. 7, created a sensation which has never perhaps been equalled. There was, to commence with, a monstrous list of all possible and impossible articles, chiefly threatened attacks upon the Edinburgh, then a violent attack upon their former defence of the Edinburgh Re- viewer's onslaught upon Burns and Wordsworth ; but the great feature in No. 7 (No. i in reality of Black- wood] was the " Translation from an Ancient Caldee Manuscript," in which the circumstances of the late feud, and Constable's endeavours to repair the for- tunes of his old magazine, and the resuscitation of " Maga" the birth, that is, of the genuine " Maga " are thrown into an allegorical burlesque. "The two beasts (the two late editors), the lamb and the bear, came unto the man who was clothed in plain apparel, and stood in the door of his house ; and his name was as if it had been the colour of ebony (Blackwood], and his number was the number of a maiden when the days of her virginity have expired (No. 17, Prince's Street), and they said unto him, Give us of thy wealth, that we may eat and live,