The magazine did not at first show signs of Scott’s loss; it continued to bear the imprint of its original publishers and its quality remained very high.  With Lamb and Hazlitt writing regularly this could hardly be otherwise.  But four months after the death of Scott and eighteen months after its establishment the London Magazine passed into the hands of the publishers Taylor & Hessey, the first number with their imprint being dated August, 1821.  Although for a while no diminution of merit was perceptible and rather an access of gaiety—­for Taylor brought Hood with him and John Hamilton Reynolds—­yet the high editorial standards of Scott ceased to be applied.  Thenceforward the decline of the magazine was steady.

John Taylor (1781-1864), senior partner in the firm of Taylor & Hessey, was known as the identifier of Sir Philip Francis with the author of “Junius,” on which subject he had issued three books.  Although unfitted for the post, he acted as editor of the London Magazine until it was again sold in 1825.

With the beginning of 1825 Taylor made a change in the magazine.  He started a new series, and increased the size and the price.  But the experiment did not answer; the spirit had evaporated; and in the autumn he sold it to Henry Southern (1799-1853), who had founded the Retrospective Review in 1820.  The last number of the London Magazine to bear Taylor & Hessey’s name, and (in my opinion) to contain anything by Lamb, was August, 1825.  We have no definite information on the matter, but there is every indication in Lamb’s Letters that Taylor was penurious and not clever in his relations with contributors.  Scott Lamb seems to have admired and liked; but even in Scott’s day payment does not seem to have been prompt.  Lamb was paid, according to Barry Cornwall, two or three times the amount of other writers, who received for prose a pound a page.  But Lamb himself says that the rate for him was twenty guineas a sheet, a sheet being sixteen pages; and he told Moore that he had received L170 for two years’ Elia.  In a letter to Barton in January, 1823, Lamb remarks:  “B——­ [Baldwin] who first engaged me as ‘Elia’ has not paid me up yet (nor any of us without repeated mortifying appeals).”

The following references to the London in Lamb’s letters to Barton tell the story of its decadence quite clearly enough.  In May, 1823:—­“I cannot but think the London drags heavily.  I miss Janus [Wainewright].  And O how it misses Hazlitt—­Procter, too, is affronted (as Janus has been) with their abominable curtailment of his things.”

Again, a little later, in September:—­“The ‘London’ I fear falls off.—­I linger among its creaking rafters, like the last rat.  It will topple down, if they don’t get some Buttresses.  They have pulled down three, W. Hazlitt, Procter, and their best stay, kind light-hearted Wainwright, their Janus.”

In January, 1824, at the beginning of his eight months’ silence:—­“The London must do without me for a time, a time, and half a time, for I have lost all interest about it.”