he had no part, and which has survived to the present day.

The Annual Register first appeared in 1758. In general character and detail of contents it originated exclusively with Edmund Burke. The typographical proportions of news and comment, as well as the space allotted to politics, art, literature, and science were all arranged by him. Long after he had ceased to have anything to do with it, his arrangements in these respects were carried out by his successors. This very hardy annual, therefore, after some 160 years from its inception bears today the impress of that imperial intellect which made Johnson say, "You could not stand for two minutes in an April shower under the same shelter as Burke and talk about the weather without finding what an extraordinary man he was." For many years Burke not only edited the work he had planned, but wrote the greater part of it too. To Burke belonged the distinction of being the first to call the newspaper press the fourth estate; while his also was the pen that, as regards conception not less than execution, provided several among the more ephemeral prints of his day with a model which, half history, half magazine as it was, they did their best to imitate.

The precedent set by Burke in 1758 showed its full results just fifty-seven years later in Scotland, and forms, because of the historic personages associating with it, an extremely interesting episode in the chronicle of periodical letters beyond the Tweed.

The Edinburgh Annual Register was designed and started by Sir Walter Scott chiefly with the object of finding remunerative employment for his old amanuensis, factor, friend, and counselor, William Laidlaw. Some permanent literary interest was given it by Sir Walter's occasional contribu

tions, including the anecdotes about Scott's gypsies afterwards placed in the introduction to Guy Mannering. The chronique of the register at first came from Scott himself, who also suggested the subjects for two or three good original articles and the abridgment of one or two curious books of travel. These instructions show a keener eye to general popularity than Burke ever opened on his undertaking. "Could I," writes the Wizard of the North, "get the head of the concern fairly round before the wind, I am sure I could make it £100 a year to you. In the present instance it would be at least £50."

"Willie Laidlaw" also forms the personal link connecting the Edinburgh Annual with the Edinburgh Magazine.

John Blackwood's father, William the first "of that ilk," was not only the creator of the firm but the founder of the magazine as well as-like his son and his nineteenth-twentieth century descendants bearing his Christian name-its sole editor. He had begun business life in 1804 as a bookseller, dealing chiefly in old and rare volumes. Neither the club nor even the tavern life of "Auld Reekie" had then organized itself on its later lines. William Blackwood's shop gradually became a literary house of call for the varied talents collected in the shadow of Arthur's Seat. The frequent meetings of the more or less distinguished habitués of the place, held in the bookseller's parlor, bore their fruit soon after the close of the Napoleonic wars in the suggestion that the success of the two great trimestrials, the Edinburgh and the Quarterly, boded well for a periodical which, appearing at shorter intervals, should combine the attractions of both, and should embody what one of its writers called the great innovating principle of pretty equal oscillation between human life

on the one hand and literature on the other.*

The April of 1817 brought with it the first number of the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine. The title was soon changed, so as to identify it more closely with the sagacious and energetic Scot who had not only projected it and bore all responsibility connected with it, but up to the seventh number suggested, commissioned, himself alone revised and modified everything it contained. His office staff, chosen with great care and after some probation for technical work, like proof-reading, quotation verifying, and other routine functions, included one Thomas Pringle, whose name and place in the Blackwood comity are only worth mentioning because they accidentally associated Sir Walter Scott for the first time with the periodical. Pringle had been given some sub-editorial work on the magazine; in that capacity he affected a Toryism in comparison with which that of his chief and superiors seemed moderate and mild. Scott's recommendation had secured his protégé "Willie Laidlaw" some small employment with Blackwood; Laidlaw, however, had the courage and unwisdom to blurt out his Whig prejudices and to tell Pringle, with whom he had principally had to do, that he hoped the periodical as it grew older would show better manners towards its political opponents. Sir Walter himself recognized that there might be room for improvement in this respect. The Tories, he said, would have little reason to thank the magazine for its championship if it continued to write about those who dared to discover defects in the Liverpool administration with the truculence which Pringle had tried to emulate in his treatment of Laidlaw. Laidlaw's illustrious patron soon forgot any passing dif

*De Quincey v. 292, Masson's edition.

ference with "Maga's" early hotheads; and if he never himself adorned its pages he became one of its warmest friends. On literary subjects Scott, like other great men on both sides, was indifferent as to the party color of the periodical in which he wrote. "For love of the (editor) Jeffrey," he contributed to the Edinburgh Review an article "Pour et Contre," based on a volume of gossip about the part played and the work done by women of various degrees. This finished, he seems free to take up something for "Maga." But before putting his own piece in hand, he recommends the November number of Blackwood, 1818, to the Duke of Buccleuch; it contains an article on General Gourgaud's Memoirs, written by a certain Vieux Routier of his grace's acquaintance.* The Duke is going to repair his health in Italy, and Sir Walter seems to hint that the remedial process will be assisted by the inclusion of Blackwood in his bag and baggage.

Thus on completing the first twelve months of its existence the magazine was conducted by the head of the firm whose name it bore on the same principles that have marked its management ever since. William Blackwood, though he took no partner of his prerogative, secured what De Quincey calls an intellectual atlas in one who had been from youth mentally not less than physically one of the most remarkable figures beheld at Glasgow and Oxford. This was John Wilson, then better known by his pen name, "Christopher North." He was an early nineteenth-century mixture of a Bayard and a Crichton. The son of a rich Paisley manufacturer, he had after a boyish training at Glasgow

*Gourgaud had been the fallen emperor's aide-de-camp. The writer of the Biackwood article was a French official of the highest position, equally well-known in Paris and London society, as well as justly passing for the most ruse man of his time on everything to do with the political coulisses of the Continent.

become a gentleman commoner at Magdalen. Here he scored a series of unbroken triumphs in the schools, on the river, and on the cricket ground, with the same air of easy mastery as that, with which after a bout of fisticuffs from the towing-path at Henley, he tossed a huge bargee into the Thames for having dared to avow certain democratic sympathies. Eventually the £50,000 left this son of Anak by his father suffered so much from the ill-management of his guardians that the aristocratic giant had to look about for a living. His mother resided in Queen's Street, Edinburgh, when he left the university. Beneath her roof he made famous and serviceable friends, whose influence secured him first а Scotch professorship, afterwards the prospect of fair practice at the Scotch Bar.

Meanwhile he had witnessed the birth of the periodical for which also he was himself to devise the sobriquet "Old Ebony." His ideas were too aggressively feudal even for Sir Walter Scott. They delighted and exactly suited Blackwood. Even in its infancy he became the literary life and soul of the magazine, often coloring by the magnetism of his personality the temper and conviction of its writers upon all subjects connected with Church and State, poetry, art, philosophy, and faith. William Blackwood the first died in 1834. Every department of the business passed to his sons, Alexander Robert and John. In publishing, as in other matters, knowledge and ability are the secret of power. Thus by the middle of the nineteenth century the representative authority of the house had concentrated itself in the friend with whom we have already seen the editor of the Times elect sharing his St. James's lodging. At that time John Blackwood's London errand was not only to organize the London branch of the

family stock, but to reconnoitre the metropolitan talent available for the magazine. He reached London without any exceptional literary acquaintances; he left it knowing all the chief literary figures of the day as well as the social and miscellaneous lions, including Benjamin Disraeli and the future Napoleon III, whom he had met in Lady Blessington's drawingroom. Both of these volunteered

contributions.

One intimacy whose beginnings he then formed remained unbroken and undiminished to the end of his life. This was with Anthony Trollope, to whom some prominence may now be given because it was largely through Blackwood that Trollope became acquainted with Charles Lever. After the late General Sir Henry Brackenbury's death Mr. Edward Dicey was probably the one survivor of Trollope's guests at Waltham Abbey. The visitors here, notwithstanding what may have been said or written to the contrary, never included the Irish novelist. Blackwood, however, had not missed those productions of his which first made their mark in the Dublin University Magazine. In due course the author of Harry Lorrequer and Charles O'Malley received his promotion to "Maga." As one of "Blackwood's men," he struck up the friendship with John Blackwood's lifelong intimate, the creator of Mrs. Proudie and Mr. Slope.

Enough has been already said to show that John Blackwood's father had introduced the star system into his periodicals so far back as Sir Walter Scott's day, with the Napoleonic article based on Gourgaud's Memoirs. The paternal tradition was enlarged and modernized by the son, who explained to Trollope himself his editorial methods, to the following effect: "As a rule I do not engage the regular literary man. He is apt to be

maniéré. I find out a man who has made a hobby of a special subject, and who can handle it with full knowledge and above all with freshness. For example I hear of (say) a rural dean who has gone in for bee-culture; I write to him to give us an article there anent. He replies he has never written an article in his life. I tell him that he has only to send his facts and we can put them together in the office. And so I get an illuminating and above all a fresh bit of work which is quoted as authoritative by all the bee fanciers of the English-speaking world. Or again, I come across a cavalry officer who has been shooting big game in the Carpathians. I ask him for an article on his experiences. He replies he has never put pen to paper. Never mind, I say, send your facts and we can put it together in the office. Again, I get a fresh racy contribution first-hand which makes the magazine an authority on a new class of subjects, and so in numberless other instances. We thus avoid the hackneyed, the conventional, and secure original, interesting matter. I always have one or more first-rate novels going on, for choice from new writers. In this way, to go back to early times, I got from a Renfrew merchant, Michael Scott, who had spent his life in the West Indies, first Tom Cringle's Log, afterwards The Cruise of the Midge. Both of these were immediately and widely successful. Only when they came out in book form after his death, did the public know the author's name."

The mistakes charged against John Blackwood's editorship were committed deliberately, and for a definite reason. Thus he excluded Thackeray, and would have nothing to do with Robert Louis Stevenson. The writing, he admitted, of each might be up to the mark. Both, however were out of political sympathy with the magazine, which was, is and ever will be, "High

Tory." John Blackwood and John T. Delane were, it has been seen, products not only of the same period but almost of the same twelve months.

The younger of the two, the magazine editor, was able at the outset, from his father's experience as well as his own, to give the great newspaper man some hints worth having because they contained the secret of his own editorial success. From Blackwood Delane learned and taught the race of editors generally the value of reflecting, elsewhere than in the leader columns, the best and most representative opinion of the time on the topics of the day. The selection of "letters to the editor," the headed articles, and very many of the more important paragraphs showed throughout Delane's time, and that of at least his immediate successor, the identity of the methods commending themselves to the NorthBritish publishing House and to Printing House Square. A novelty in the Times one day became the accepted usage of the entire daily press soon afterwards. Not seldom during the nineteenth century's first half the primitive leaders in the Times echoed in their attacks upon Melbourne, the Whigs generally, and Macaulay in particular, the note first sounded by the Tory Magazinists. The influences which created the measured leading article of our own time were yet not more than partially operative; and the true genesis of the leader was in periodicals appearing in longer than monthly intervals. Fifteen years before Blackwood's day the Edinburgh Review in 1802 and the Quarterly four years afterwards had been the first to provide the daily journalists of the better sort with models, as regards construction and tone, in discussing the topics of the day. Between 1825 and 1845 came Macaulay's well-knitted picturesque and widely inspiring effects in the old "Blue and Yellow."

Then and not till then did the leading article, as it was formerly known, develop into the dominating feature of the nineteenth-century press. The penny paper-leaders and headed articles alike-bore a not less visible stamp of magazine paternity. No great genius of the pen was ever a more consummate master of the technicalities of his art, or imparted them more successfully to his writers.

Then Charles Dickens. The offices of Household Words and of All the The London Quarterly Review.

Year Round became journalistic schools, turning out the best miscellaneous newspaper hands during some threequarters of Queen Victoria's reign. Meanwhile, especially in his roundabout Cornhill papers and sometimes topical essays, Thackeray was training pupils for another branch. The late Maurice Drummond created the occasional note in the P.M.G., but the pattern for its early miscellaneous articles was set by the man who had devised the title, but did not live to see the journal's birth.

T. H. S. Escott.

CHAPTER II.

Selma Durell and Ruth Davenport formed a pleasant contrast, as well in antecedents as in looks. Ruth had the freshness and demure prettiness of the daisy, and, being the eldest child of a large family of modest means, had learned how to practise self-denial winningly. Anselma, to give her name in full, was rather striking in appearance, and had been brought up as the only child of parents who could afford to indulge her. Indeed, Mrs. Fairfield shrewdly suspected that, when one got to know her better, she would turn out to have been spoiled. But this did not happen. Except when ruffled, Selma was by nature amiable, and, except in being rather easily hurt, gave no indication of the slightly enervating influences attending her upbringing. Of the two, little Ruth had distinctly the more courage, and was more ready to take the initiative in difficulties. Selma quickly developed the habit of appealing to her, and indeed of leaning on her. With Edwin to amuse and to escort them, the two girls asked nothing better than to take life as it came. Edwin, for his part,

"He is looking about him," said his father to Mrs. Fairfield, quite prepared to take the defensive. And to "look about" is excellent, provided that the process be not too prolonged.

Meantime the Squire and his wife were interested spectators, each being fully prepared, should occasion offer, to take the other to task for infringement of their compact of nonintervention.

"Give them time to get acquainted," Mrs. Fairfield would remonstrate when her impatient lord and master prematurely demanded developments. "Our Edwin is not one to fall in love at first sight-he has too much sense for that. He is constitutionally deliberate."

"He takes it from you, then," retorted her spouse. But, so far, he himself had detected no sign of a preference on his son's part, and he was beginning to wonder inwardly what the young fellow was made of.