Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/263

227 WILLIAM BLA CKWOOD. 22? were ridiculed, but his more worthy pieces were praised in no niggardly terms. At the moment Mr. Tennyson was irritated, but his anger soon evapor- ated in some not very pungent lines to " Rusty, Crusty Christopher," which he has long since seen fit to sup- press ; and, eventually, he exhibited a due acknow- ledgment of the truth of Wilson's criticism, by re- moving several pieces and altering others. " Stoddart and Aytoun," writes Wilson in this same review, " he of the ' Death Wake' and he of 'Poland,' are gra- ciously regarded by old Christopher ; and their volume presentation copies have been placed among the essays of those gifted youths, of whom, in riper years, much may be confidently predicted of fair and good " a sentence worth quoting, when it is remembered that Aytoun afterwards married Wilson's daughter, and in a few years occupied his position in the pages of Maga itself. In 1833, Blackwood was still full of schemes and enterprises ; he commenced the publication of Alison's " History of Europe." Only the first two volumes were published, and then not altogether successfully, when Blackwood was stricken down by a mortal disease, a tumour in the groin, which, in a weary ill- ness of four months, exhausted his physical energies, but left his temper calm and unruffled, and his intellect vigorous to the last. He was attended by Moir the sweet-toned "Delta" of his magazine who had another dying patient scarce a hundred yards off. This was Gait, who had been personally estranged from Black- wood by rough advice and strictures as to one of his stories. Now, however, that they lay dying so near each to each, the old friendliness returned, and Moir bore pleasant messages and hopeful wishes from one