The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart
Chapter 6: 1817-19
John Barrow to Macvey Napier, 17 October 1818
“Admiralty, 17th October 1818.
“My dear Sir,— . . .
I assure you that your information respecting my aid to
Blackwood’s
Magazine is wholly unfounded. I have not, in fact, once
been asked to do so, and from what I have seen of it, little value as I set on
anything that proceeds from my pen, I think that I should feel no disposition
to enter the lists. . . . To fair and liberal criticism I have not the least
objection. If a man chooses to come before the public in print, his doctrines
and opinions and his style are all fair game; but I thoroughly, and from my
soul, detest those vile and slanderous personalities which are too much the
fashion of the present day; but are they not peculiarly the vice that besets
the gude town of Edinburgh? Were they not enrolled there? Did not the Edinburgh
Review set the example of personal attack and party rancour?
And have not your own domestic literary squabbles been conducted in that style
ever since? The attack on Professor
1 (For examining these papers, and for making
extracts, I have to thank Miss Violet A. Simpson,
who has aided me in other researches.) |
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Playfair I have not seen and never heard
of; but I did hear that the Professor, I suppose in some moment of irritation,
declared aloud, in a public assembly, that the Quarterly Review was a most contemptible
journal, and a disgrace to the literature of the age. Now, if such be the fact,
and the young men you speak of who are friendly to the Quarterly should have heard it,
Professor Playfair cannot refuse them the fair play (vile pun) of retaliation. But I know nothing
of the matter in dispute one way or other, nor do I believe it interests us of
the South in the slightest degree. For my own part, I am candid enough to
confess that, in spite of the, talent put forth in the Edinburgh Review, and the trash which the
learned Professor finds in the Quarterly, I am stupid enough to derive more amusement
from the latter than the former, and this does not arise, I can assure you,
from the slightest prejudice for or against either. . . .
“Very faithfully yours.”
John Playfair (1748-1819)
Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh University and Whig man of letters who contributed
to the
Edinburgh Review.
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. (1817-1980). Begun as the
Edinburgh Monthly Magazine,
Blackwood's assumed the name of its proprietor, William Blackwood after the sixth
number. Blackwood was the nominal editor until 1834.
