ond, with most blamable indiscretion, did not inform
his principal. At the second fire Christie's ball struck Scott just
above the right hip, and he fell. He lingered till the 27th. It was
said at the time that Hazlitt, perhaps unintentionally, had driven Scott
to fight by indirect taunts. "I don't pretend," Hazlitt is reported to
have said, "to hold the principles of honour which you hold. I would
neither give nor accept a challenge. You hold the opinions of the world;
with you it is different. As for me, it would be nothing. I do not think
as you and the world think," and so on. Poor Scott, not yet forty, had
married the pretty daughter of Colnaghi, the printseller in Pall Mall,
and left two children.

For the five years it lasted, perhaps no magazine--not even the mighty
_Maga_ itself--ever drew talent towards it with such magnetic
attraction. In Mr. Barry Cornwall's delightful memoir of his old friend
Lamb, written when the writer was in his seventy-third year, he has
summarised the writers on the _London_, and shown how deep and varied
was the intellect brought to bear on its production. First of all he
mentions poor Scott, a shrewd, critical, rather hasty man, who wrote
essays on Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Godwin, Byron, Keats, Shelley,
Leigh Hunt, and Hazlitt, his wonderful contemporaries, in a fruitful
age. Hazlitt, glowing and capricious, produced the twelve essays of his
"Table Talk," many dramatic articles, and papers on Beckford's Fonthill,
the Angerstein pictures, and the Elgin marbles--pages wealthy with
thought. Lamb contributed in three years all the matchless essays of
"Elia." Mr. Thomas Carlyle, then only a promising young Scotch
philosopher, wrote several articles on the "Life and Writings of
Schiller." Mr. de Quincey, that subtle thinker and bitter Tory,
contributed his wonderful "Confessions of an Opium-Eater." That learned
and amiable man, the Rev. H.F. Cary, the translator of Dante, wrote
several interesting notices of early French poets. Allan Cunningham, the
vigorous Scottish bard, sent the romantic "Tales of Lyddal Cross" and a
series of papers styled "Traditional Literature." Mr. John
Poole--recently deceased, 1872--(the author of _Paul Pry_ and that
humorous novel, "Little Pedlington," which is supposed to have furnished
Mr. Charles Dickens with some suggestions for "Pickwick") wrote
burlesque imitations of contemporaneous dramatic writers--Morton,
Dibdin, Reynolds, Moncrieff, &c. Mr. J.H.