been properly understood nor appreciated,
either abroad or at home, owing to circumstances the public are
unacquainted with.

While exercising despotic power, in all that concerned the management of
that bold and saucy and at times unprincipled work, in all that
concerned the management or the contributors, and never yielding even to
"Old Christopher" himself, who passed for the editor, where any serious
question sprang up, he was so careful to keep out of sight himself, and
to thrust that old gentleman forward, upon all occasions,--a sort of
myth, at the best,--a shadowy, mysterious personage, who deceived
nobody, and whom all were glad enough to take on trust, well knowing
that Professor Wilson was behind the mask,--that, up to this day,
William Blackwood, the little, tough, wiry Scotch bookseller, with a big
heart, and a pericardium of net-work,--interwoven steel springs,--has
been regarded as the publisher and proprietor only, and Professor Wilson
as the editor, and one who would suffer no interference with his
prerogative, and "bear no brother near the throne."

To bring about this belief, Blackwood spared no expense of indirect
assertion, and no outlay of incidental evidence. Never faltering in his
first plan, and never foregoing an opportunity of strengthening the
public delusion, what cared he for the reputation of editorship, so long
as the great mystery paid? Walter Scott had already shown how profitably
and safely such a game might be played, year after year, in the midst of
the enemies' camp; and Blackwood was just the man to profit by such
experience.

In the Life of Professor Wilson, by his daughter, Mrs. Gordon, edited
here by Professor Mackenzie, there might be found enough to disabuse the
public upon this point, if it were not read by the lamplight--or
twilight--of long-cherished opinions.

But as Blackwood, the shrewd, sharp, wary Scotchman, always talked about
"our worthy friend Christopher" as a real, and not a mythological
personage,--as if, in short, he were himself and nobody else,--and never
of Wilson but as one of the contributors, or as the author of "Margaret
Lyndsay" or "The Isle of Palms," and then with a look or a smile which
he never explained, and which nobody out of the charmed circle ever
understood, no wonder the delusion was kept up to the last.

"All I can say," he once wrote me, while negotiating for more
grist,--"all I can say is, that whatever is good in itself we are always