effect was highly favorable to the new magazine.  It gave it—­what had been lacking before—­notoriety and a recognized position, and made its existence no longer a matter of indifference.  It was known that Hogg conceived the idea, and wrote some portion of the article.  But few could believe, as was claimed by some, that all the sharp touches came from his hand.  Hogg, it appears, wrote the first part; Wilson and Lockhart together contributed most of the remainder, amidst side-splitting guffaws, in a session in the house of the Dowager Wilson, in Queen Street; while the philosophic Sir William Hamilton, in adding his mite, was so moved by uproarious cachinnation that he fairly tumbled out of his chair.

The power and personality which thus early characterized the magazine were its leading features in after-years.  Wilson and Lockhart became at once its chief contributors,—­Wilson especially writing for its columns, with the most extraordinary profusion, on all conceivable topics, in prose and verse, for more than thirty years.  By these articles he became known beyond his own circle, and on these his fame must ultimately rest.  His daughter points to them with pride, and unhesitatingly expresses the opinion that they in themselves are a sufficient answer to all who doubt whether the great powers of their author ever found adequate expression.  We are unable to agree with her.  Able and brilliant as these articles unquestionably were, we cannot think that such glimpses and fragments—­or, in fact, all the relics left by their author—­furnish results at all commensurate with the man.  Though Maga increased his immediate reputation, we think it diminished his lasting fame, by leading him to scatter, instead of concentrating his remarkable powers on some one great work.  Scott and other great authorities saw so much native genius in Wilson, that they often said that it lay in him to become the first man of his time, though they feared that his eccentricities and lack of steadiness might prove fatal to his success.

Though never really the editor of “Blackwood,” Wilson was from the first its guiding spirit,—­the leaven that leavened the whole lump.  The way in which he threw himself into his work he described as follows:—­“We love to do our work by fits and starts.  We hate to keep fiddling away, an hour or two at a time, at one article for weeks.  So off with our coat, and at it like a blacksmith.  When we once get the way of it, hand over hip, we laugh at Vulcan and all his Cyclops.  From nine of the morning till nine at night, we keep hammering away at the metal, iron or gold, till we produce a most beautiful article.  A biscuit and a glass of Madeira, twice or thrice at the most,—­and then to a well-won dinner.  In three days, gentle reader, have We, Christopher North, often produced a whole magazine,—­a most splendid number.  For the next three weeks we were as idle as a desert, and as vast as an antre,—­and thus on we go, alternately laboring like an ant, and relaxing