py victims of misgoverned passions.

Maginn was also one of the earlier contributors to the "Literary
Gazette," and Jerdan has recorded with what delight he used to open a
packet directed in the well-known hand, with the post-mark Cork. The
Doctor, it is said, was invited to London in order to share with Hook
the labors of the "John Bull." I believe, however, he was but a very
limited help. Perhaps the old adage, "Two of a trade," applied in this
case; certain it is that he subsequently found a more appreciative
paymaster in Westmacott, who conducted "The Age," a newspaper then
greatly patronized, but, as I have said, one that now would be
universally branded with the term "infamous."

It is known also that he became a leading contributor to "Fraser's
Magazine,"--a magazine that took its name less from its publisher,
Fraser, than from its first editor, Fraser, a barrister, whose fate, I
have understood, was as mournful as his career had been discreditable.
The particulars of Maginn's duel with Grantley Berkeley are well known.
It arose out of an article in "Fraser," reviewing Berkeley's novel, in
the course of which he spoke in utterly unjustifiable terms of
Berkeley's mother. Mr. Berkeley was not satisfied with inflicting on the
publisher so severe a beating that it was the proximate cause of his
death, but called out the Doctor, who manfully avowed the authorship.
Each, it is understood, fired five shots, without further effect than
that one ball struck the whisker of Mr. Berkeley and another the boot of
Maginn, and when Fraser, who was Maginn's second, asked if there should
be another shot, Maginn is reported to have said, "Blaze away, by ----!
a barrel of powder!"

The career of Maginn in London was, to say the least, mournful. Few men
ever started with better prospects; there was hardly any position in the
state to which he might not have aspired. His learning was profound; his
wit of the tongue and of the pen ready, pointed, caustic, and brilliant;
his writings, essays, tales, poems, scholastic disquisitions, in short,
his writings upon all conceivable topics, were of the very highest
order; "O'Doherty" is one of the names that made "Blackwood" famous. His
acquaintances, who would willingly have been his friends, were not only
the men of genius of his time, but among them were several noblemen and
statesmen of power as well as rank. In a word, he might have climbed to
the highest round of the ladder, with helpin