untry and the Cockney schools, Toryism and Liberalism
(though the _London_ was by no means so thoroughgoing on the Liberal
side as _Blackwood_ was on the Tory, and some of its most distinguished
contributors were either Tory, as De Quincey, or neutral, as Lamb)
fought out their differences under the two flags. And by a climax of
coincidence, the fate of the _London_ was practically decided by the
duel which killed John Scott, its editor, this duel being the direct
result of an editorial or contributorial quarrel between the two
periodicals.

Both these magazines, besides being more frequent in appearance than the
_Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly_, attempted, as their very title of
"magazine" expressed, a much wider and more miscellaneous collection of
subjects than the strict "review" theory permitted. From the very first
_Blackwood_ gave a welcome to fiction, to poetry, and to the widest
possible construction of the essay, while, in almost every respect, the
_London_ was equally hospitable. Both had staffs of unusual strength,
and of still more unusual personality; and while the _London_ could
boast of Charles Lamb, of Hazlitt, of De Quincey, of Hood, of Miss
Mitford, besides many lesser names, _Blackwood_ was practically
launched by the triumvirate of Wilson, Lockhart, and the Ettrick
Shepherd, with the speedy collaboration of Maginn.

The eldest of these, and if not the most vigorous, if very nearly the
least prolific, yet the most exquisite and singular in literary genius,
was Charles Lamb. He also was of the "Seventy Club," as we may call it,
which founded the literature of the nineteenth century, and he was born
in London on 18th February 1775. He was of rather lower birth than most
of its other members (if membership can be predicated of a purely
imaginary body), being the son of a lawyer's clerk and confidential
servant; but he was educated at Christ's Hospital, and, through the
interest of his father's employer, obtained, at the age of seventeen, a
berth in the East India House, which assured his modest fortunes through
life. But there was the curse of madness in his family, and though he
himself escaped with but one slight and passing attack of actual lunacy,
and at the cost of an eccentricity which only imparted a rarer touch to
his genius, his elder sister Mary was subject to constant seizures, in
one of which she stabbed her mother to the heart. She was more gently
dealt with than perhaps would have been the