Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/294

254 254 CHAMBERS, KNIGHT, AND CASSELL, Mr. Knight was his own editor, and with the assist- ance of such writers, his periodical could not fail to be a success. Even Christopher North, in Edinburgh, was moved to write of them as a hopeful class of " young scholars," and Knight retorted to this stale accusation of youth by declaring that he had read and rejected seventy-eight prose articles, and one hundred and twenty copies of occasional verses, " all the property of the old periodical press," while Praed wrote saucily enough, that " Christopher North is a barn from his wig to his slippers." After the first two numbers, Macaulay felt con- strained to retire, as his father objected to the political opinions of the magazine, but he was luckily induced to alter his mind, and to the future numbers he contri- buted the best of his early poems notably, "Moncon- toria" and "Ivry"and the "Songs of the Civil Wars." Here, too, were printed Praed 's most charming jeux d'esprits, so called, though depth of feeling and noble- ness of sentiment often lay beneath their airy banter- ing tone. De Quincey, then almost starving in the streets of London, was made lovingly free of its pages, and the Quarterly Magazine attained a great celebrity as the most classical, and yet the lightest, gayest, and most pleasing periodical of the day. Unfortunately a division occurred among the con- tributors themselves their opinions, and the opinions they expressed, were as widely divergent as the four winds of heaven their supply of matter was quite irregular, varying with the individual amusements of the hour reaching, Knight tells us, to " wanton neg- lect ;" and after many dissensions, the publisher felt "that he had to choose between surrendering the responsibility which his duties to society had com-