akespeare_, _The Elizabethan Dramatists_, _The English Poets_, and
_The English Comic Writers_, with not a few scattered things in his
other writings, make what is on the whole the best corpus of criticism
by a single writer in English on English. He is the critics' critic as
Spenser is the poets' poet; that is to say, he has, errors excepted and
deficiencies allowed, the greatest proportion of the strictly critical
excellencies--of the qualities which make a critic--that any English
writer of his craft has ever possessed.

_Blackwood's Magazine_, the headquarters, the citadel, the _place
d'armes_ of the opposition to the Cockney school and of criticism and
journalism that were Tory first of all, enlisted a younger set of
recruits than those hitherto mentioned, and the special style of writing
which it introduced, though exceedingly clever and stimulating, lent
itself rather less to dispassionate literary appreciation than even the
avowedly partisan methods of the _Edinburgh_. In its successful form
(for it had a short and inglorious existence before it found out the
way) it was launched by an audacious "skit" on the literati of Edinburgh
written by John Wilson, John Gibson Lockhart, and James Hogg, while very
soon after its establishment it was joined by a wild and witty Bohemian
scholar from the south of Ireland, William Maginn, who, though before
long he drifted away to other resorts, and ere many years established in
_Fraser_ a new abode of guerilla journalism, impressed on _Blackwood_
itself, before he left it, several of its best-known features, and in
particular is said to have practically started the famous _Noctes
Ambrosianae_. Of Hogg, enough has been said in a former chapter. For the
critical purpose of "Maga," as _Blackwood's Magazine_ loved to call
itself, he was rather a butt, or, to speak less despiteously, a
stimulant, than an originator; and he had neither the education nor
indeed the gifts of a critic. Of each of the others some account must
be given, and Maginn will introduce yet another flight of brilliant
journalists, some of whom, especially the greatest of all, Carlyle,
lived till far into the last quarter of the present century.

Wilson, the eldest of those just mentioned, though a younger man than
any one as yet noticed in this chapter, and for many years the guiding
spirit (there never has been any "editor" of _Blackwood_ except the
members of the firm who have published it) of _Maga_, must at