eviad_ ridicule of
literary affectations. He was succeeded in 1824 by John Gibson Lockhart,
the son-in-law of Walter Scott, and the author of an excellent _Life of
Scott_. _Blackwood's_ was edited by John Wilson, Professor of Moral
Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, who, under the pen-name of
"Christopher North," contributed to his magazine a series of brilliant
imaginary dialogues between famous characters of the day, entitled
_Noctes Ambrosianae_, because they were supposed to take place at
Ambrose's tavern in Edinburgh. These papers were full of a profuse,
headlong eloquence, of humor, literary criticism, and personalities
interspersed with songs expressive of a roystering and convivial Toryism
and an uproarious contempt for Whigs and cockneys. These reviews and
magazines, and others which sprang up beside them, became the _nuclei_
about which the wit and scholarship of both parties gathered. Political
controversy under the Regency and the reign of George IV. was thus
carried on more regularly by permanent organs, and no longer so largely
by privateering, in the shape of pamphlets, like Swift's _Public Spirit
of the Allies_, Johnson's _Taxation No Tyranny_, and Burke's
_Reflections on the Revolution in France_. Nor did politics by any means
usurp the columns of the reviews. Literature, art, science, the whole
circle of human effort and achievement passed under review.
_Blackwood's_, _Fraser's_, and the other monthlies published stories,
poetry, criticism, and correspondence--every thing, in short, which
enters into the make-up of our magazines to-day, except illustrations.

Two main influences, of foreign origin, have left their trace in the
English writers of the first thirty years of the 19th century, the one
communicated by contact with the new German literature of the latter
half of the 18th century, and in particular with the writings of Goethe,
Schiller, and Kant; the other springing from the events of the French
Revolution. The influence of German upon English literature in the 19th
century was more intellectual and less formal than that of the Italian
in the 16th and of the French in the 18th. In other words, the German
writers furnished the English with ideas and ways of feeling rather than
with models of style. Goethe and Schiller did not become subjects for
literary imitation as Moliere, Racine, and Boileau had become in Pope's
time. It was reserved for a later generation and for Thomas Carlyle to