Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/262

226 226 WILLIAM BLA CKWOOD. management of less vigorous minds, a very rare degree of tact and sagacity. To return to the magazine. After Lockhart and Maginn left Edinburgh, the bitterly personal tone by which it had been so frequently disfigured, was almost entirely dropped ; and this negative fact, aided by the positive one of the great popularity of the Noctes, raised the circulation immensely. In 1826, an early Elleray friend of Wilson's, De Quincey, "the opium-eater," began to discourse of things German in the pages of Maga ; and in 1830, the "Diary of a Late Physician" was commenced. This, one of the most successful works of modern fiction, had, Warren tells us, " been offered succes- sively to the conductors of three leading magazines in London, and rejected as ' unsuitable for their pages,' and ' not likely to interest the public.' ... I have this morning been referring to nearly fifty letters which he (Blackwood) wrote to me during the publi- cation of the first fifteen chapters of his * Diary.' The perusal of them occasioned me lively emotion. All of them evidence the remarkable tact and energy with which he conducted his magazine. . . . He was a man of strong intellect, of great personal sagacity, of unrivalled energy and industry, of high and in- flexible honour in every transaction, great or small, that I ever heard of his being concerned in." Contemporary with the publication of the " Diary," was that of the successful books "Tom Cringle's Log" and "Sir Frizzle Pumpkin's Nights at Mess," the first by Michael Scott, and the second by the Reverend Mr. White. In May, 1832, appeared Wil- son's review of Mr. Tennyson's first volume ; in which the affectations of Mr. Tennyson's earlier writings