to
_Fraser_. Later he wrote for both the great Reviews. He was
long the last survivor of the early _Blackwood_ and _Fraser_
groups. He died in 1888, in his ninety-third year. The name
which stood next to Lockhart in the alphabetical arrangement
of the first class was that of Henry Hart Milman, his dear
friend in later life, and one of his most constant and valued
allies in the _Quarterly_. His correspondence with Milman
forms an interesting feature of Lang's _Life_.]

What Lockhart thought of these youthful literary escapades in his
sober and saddened middle age is shown in a letter written in 1838: "I
was a raw boy who had never before had the least connection with
politics or controversies of any kind, when, arriving in Edinburgh in
October, 1817, I found my friend John Wilson (ten years my senior)
busied in helping Blackwood out of a scrape he had got into with some
editors of his Magazine, and on Wilson's asking me to try my hand at
some squibberies in his aid, I sat down to do so with as little malice
as if the assigned subject had been the Court of Pekin. But the row in
Edinburgh, the lordly Whigs having considered persiflage as their own
fee-simple, was really so extravagant that when I think of it now the
whole story seems wildly incredible. Wilson and I were singled out to
bear the whole burden of sin, though there were abundance of other
criminals in the concern; and by and by, Wilson passing for being a
very eccentric fellow, and I for a cool one, even he was allowed to
get off comparatively scot-free, while I, by far the youngest and
least experienced of the set, and who alone had no personal grudges
against any of Blackwood's victims, remained under such an
accumulation of wrath and contumely as would have crushed me utterly,
unless for the buoyancy of extreme youth. I now think with deep
sadness of the pain my jokes and jibes inflicted on better men than
myself, and I can say that I have omitted in my mature years no
opportunity of trying to make reparation where I really had been the
offender. But I was not the doer of half the deeds set down to my
account, nor can I, in the face of much evidence printed and
unprinted, believe that, after all, our Ebony (as we used to call the
man and his book) had half so much to answer for as the more regular
artillery {p.xix} which the old Quarterly played incessantly, in
those days, on the same p