. 'Christopher North', a memoir of John Wilson ... : compiled from family papers and other sources . - unnecessary obstacles in their way. Inshort, they were very young, or very inexperienced men. who, although passionately fond of lit-erature, and even well skilled in many of its finest branches, were by no means accurately ac-quainted with the structure and practice of literature as it exists at this day in Britain. . .They approached the lists of literary warfare with the spirit at bottom of true knights : but theyhad come from the woods and the cloisters, and not from the cities and haunts
. 'Christopher North', a memoir of John Wilson ... : compiled from family papers and other sources . - unnecessary obstacles in their way. Inshort, they were very young, or very inexperienced men. who, although passionately fond of lit-erature, and even well skilled in many of its finest branches, were by no means accurately ac-quainted with the structure and practice of literature as it exists at this day in Britain. . .They approached the lists of literary warfare with the spirit at bottom of true knights : but theyhad come from the woods and the cloisters, and not from the cities and haunts of active men, andthey had armed themselves, in addition to their weapons of the right temper, with many otherweapons of oifence, which, although sanctioned in former times by the practice of the heroes inwhose repositories they had found them rusting, had now become utterly exploded, and were re-garded, and justly regarded, as entirely unjustifiable and disgraceful by all who surveyed withmodern eves the arena of thei ? Mr. Wilson, alias The Leopard. LITERATURE. BLACKWOODS MAGAZINE. 167 age, whose name it was in vain to ask, and whose personality wasitself a mystery. On that point the public, which cannot rest satis-fied without attributing specific powers to specific persons, refusedafter a time to acknowledge the mystery, and insisted on recog-nizing in John Wilson the real impersonation of Blackwoods veiled editor. The error has been often emphatically corrected:let it once again be repeated, on the best authority, that the onlyreal editor Blackwood1 s Magazine ever had was Blackwood him-self. Of this fact I have abundant proofs. Suffice it that contribu-tions from Wilsons own pen have been altered, cut down, and keptback, in compliance with the strong will of the man whose name onthe title-page of the Magazine truly indicated with whom lay thesole responsibility of the management. At what precise date my father came into personal communica-tion wdth Mr. Blackw
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