William Maginn, along with John Wilson, was one of the supreme magazinists of the first half of the nineteenth century, though his once-brilliant reputation has fallen into the decay usually associated with writers of miscellany and of literary journalism. Robert Shelton Mackenzie dedicated his posthumous edition of Maginn's Miscellaneous Writings (1855-1857) to a friend of the author, noting that without his assistance, "I should have been unable ... to affiliate many of the articles, so pertinaciously did [Maginn] maintain the anonymous, and so Protean were his changes of style and subject." But even in the 1850s and with the aid of friends, Mackenzie made errors of attribution that modern scholars are still trying to sort out. Maginn's reputation, earned mostly through anonymous contributions to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Fraser's Town and Country Magazine, and Bentley's Magazine, has greatly suffered because of his greatest strengths. His variety of genres, his pungent...