I PRESUME you have now done as I requested; and if so, I have no doubt you are prepared to listen to what I have to say with a more philosophic temper. The prejudices you had taken up without seeing the book, have, I make no question, made unto themselves wings and passed away—at least the most serious of them,—and you are probably quite as capable of taking a calm and impartial view of the affair as I myself am; for as to my allowing any partiality for Wastle seriously to warp my judgment concerning a literary Journal, in which he sometimes writes—this is, I assure you, a most absurd suspicion of your’s—but transeat cum aliis.

The history of Blackwood's Magazine is very singular in itself, and I think must long continue to form an important epoch in the literary history of Scotland—above all of Edinburgh. The time of its first appearance was happily chosen, just when the decline of that intense and overmastering interest, formerly attracted to the Edinburgh Review, had fairly begun to be not only felt, but acknowledged on every hand; and had it not appeared at that particular time, it is probable that something, not widely different in spirit and purpose, must have ere long come forth; for there had already been formed in Scotland a considerable body of rebels to the long undisputed tyrannical sway of Mr Jeffrey and his friends; and it was necessary that the sentiments of this class should find some vehicle of convenient expression. In short, the diet of levity and sarcastic indifference, which had so long formed the stable nourishment of Scottish intellect, had by repetition lost, to not a few palates, the charming poignancy of its original flavour; and besides, the total failure of all the political prophecies of the Whig wits, and, indeed, the triumphant practical refutation given by the great events of the preceding years to all their enunciations of political principles, had, without doubt, tended very powerfully to throw discredit upon their opinions in regard to other matters.