Two gentlemen were engaged--Pringle and Cleghorn--who had received their training in the enemy’s camp, as editors in chief, and with the assistance of Hogg, and the promised support of Scott and many other men of talent, the first number of the _Edinburgh Monthly Magazine_ was issued on All-Fools’ Day, 1817--an ominous day for Blackwood, for he soon discovered that the prophets he had summoned to curse, heaped blessings on the heads of his opponents. This first number differed but little from other periodicals of its class. Only half the space was devoted to original matter, and the very opening pages contained a panegyric upon Horner, then lately deceased, an _Edinburgh Reviewer_--a Whig, and not much else. “You can’t say too much about Sydney Smith and Brougham,” said Scott to Jeffrey; “but I will not admire your Horner. He always puts me in mind of Obadiah’s bull, who, although, as Father Shandy observed, he never produced a calf, went through his business with such a grave demeanour that he always maintained his credit in the parish.” Nor was this the worst. In No. 3 a violent defence of the _Edinburgh_ was undertaken warmly. This was too much for Blackwood; he gave his editors notice of a coming change, and after much chaffering he was glad to pay £125 down, and get rid at once of them and the magazine; and--somewhat, doubtless, to his chagrin--they immediately returned to Constable and took charge of the _Scots Magazine_, which, under the title of _Constable’s Edinburgh Magazine_, made a futile effort to re-juvenate itself. With the sixth number of the _Edinburgh Monthly Magazine_ had appeared a notice stating that “this work is now discontinued, this being the last number of it;” but in the following month, with an alteration in the title, it arose, Phœnix-like, from the ashes, and, as _Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine_, No. 7, created a sensation which has never perhaps been equalled. There was, to commence with, a monstrous list of all possible and impossible articles, chiefly threatened attacks upon the _Edinburgh_, then a violent attack upon their former defence of the _Edinburgh Reviewer’s_ onslaught upon Burns and Wordsworth; but the great feature in No. 7 (No. 1 in reality of _Blackwood_) was the “Translation from an Ancient Caldee Manuscript,” in which the circumstances of the late feud, and Constable’s endeavours to repair the fortunes of his old magazine, and the resuscitation of “Maga”--the birth, that is, of the genuine “Maga”--are thrown into an allegorical burlesque.