North.—­The answer to that question I will borrow from the satire itself, as you choose to term your scurrilous lampoon.  Our present affair, then, is to consider whether Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversation writer, in rushlight emulation of the wax-candles that illumine our Noctes, shall be raised, as he aspires, to the dignity of Fellow of the Blackwood Society.  In the note at page 13 of the said lampoon, you state that “Lord Byron declared that no gentleman could write in Blackwood;” and you ask, “Has this assertion been ever disproved by experiment?” Now, Mr. Landor, as you have thus adopted and often re-echoed Lord Byron’s opinion, that no gentleman could write in Blackwood, and yet wish to enrol yourself among our writers, what is the inference?

Landor.  That I confess myself no gentleman, you would infer. I make no such confession.  I would disprove Byron’s assertion, by making the experiment.

North.  You do us too much honour.  Yet reflect, Mr. Landor.  After the character you have given us, would you verily seek to be of our fraternity?  You who have denounced us so grandiloquently—­you who claim credit for lofty and disinterested principles of action?  Recollect that you have represented us as the worthy men who have turned into ridicule Lamb, Keats, Hazlitt, Coleridge—­(diverse metals curiously graduated!)—­all in short, who, recently dead, are now dividing among them the admiration of their country.  Whatever could lessen their estimation; whatever could injure their fortune; whatever could make their poverty more bitter; whatever could tend to cast down their aspirations after fame; whatever had a tendency to drive them to the grave which now has opened to them, was incessantly brought into action against them by us zealots for religion and laws.  A more deliberate, a more torturing murder, never was committed, than the murder of Keats.  The chief perpetrator of his murder knew beforehand that he could not be hanged for it.  These are your words, Mr. Landor.

Landor.—­I do not deny them.

North.—­And in regard to the taste of the common public for Blackwood’s Cordials, you have said that, to those who are habituated to the gin-shop, the dram is sustenance, and they feel themselves both uncomfortable and empty without the hot excitement. Blackwood’s is really a gin-palace. Landor.—­All this I have both said and printed, and the last sentence you have just read from my satire is preceded by one that you have not read.  An exposure of the impudence and falsehood of Blackwood’s Magazine is not likely to injure its character, or diminish the number of its subscribers; and in this sentence you have the secret of my desire to become a contributor to Blackwood.  I want a popular vehicle to convey my censures to the world, especially on Wordsworth.  I do not pretend to have any love for you and your brotherhood, Mr. North.  But I dislike you less than I do Wordsworth; and I frankly own to you, that the fame of that man is a perpetual blister to my self-love.