Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/246

210 210 WILLIAM BLA CKWOOD. caused, withdrew the obnoxious article from the second edition, suppressed it in what he could of the first, and in the second number inserted the following announcement : " The editor has learnt with regret that an article in the first edition of last number, which was intended merely as a jeu d? esprit, has been construed so as to give ofTence to individuals justly entitled to respect and regard ; he has, on that ac- count, withdrawn it in the second edition, and can only add that, if what has happened could have been anticipated, the article in question certainly never would have appeared." It was, however, too late, war had been declared to the knife, and Blackwood was nothing loath to continue the struggle. " The conception of the Caldee MS.," says Wilson's son-in-law, Professor Ferrier, " and the first thirty- seven verses of Chapter I., are to be ascribed to the Ettrick Shepherd ; the rest of the composition falls to be divided between Professor Wilson and Mr. Lock- hart, in proportions which cannot now be determined." Again, Mrs. Gordon tells us that this audacious squib was composed in her grandmother's house, 23, Queen Street, where Wilson lived, " amid such shouts of laughter as made the ladies in the room above send to inquire and wonder what the gentlemen below were about ;" and yet she adds, as if to protect her father from suspicion of a share in it, that she " cannot trace to her father's hand any instance of unmanly attack, or one shade of real malignity." Very probably not ; but at the same time the fun of the squib is decidedly in Wilson's favourite manner. " An old contributor to Blackwood, 3 ' who, in 1860, furnished a most interest- ing and full account of Maga and Blackwoodiana to the columns of the Bookseller, asserts, in reference to