Briefless both, and both endowed with strong literary tastes, they became sworn friends, though Wilson, with his splendid physique, his loose-flowing yellow hair, his deep-blue eyes, his glowing imagination, his eloquent tongue, and his defiance of all precedent, was as opposite a being as well could be imagined to Lockhart, who, to borrow Wilson’s own words, had “an e’e like an eagle’s, and a sort of lauch about the screwed-up mouth o’ him that fules ca’d nae canny, for they couldna tholl the meaning o’t; and either set dumb-foundered, or pretended to be engaged to sooper, and slunk out o’ the room.” With two such men as these it was little wonder that Blackwood resolved to continue the battle. The weapon, however, which had been so successfully used in the onslaught upon the _Edinburgh Review_ became in the hands of young writers flushed with victory, instruments of aggression against those who had never offended; and, as it happened that the writers who were most personal in their attacks upon friend and foe alike were also the cleverest and most brilliant, Blackwood’s position became one of difficulty. Lockhart “who stung the faces of men”--and sometimes their hearts--cared little as to who his shafts were directed against so long as they were sharp and biting. Cameleon-like he appeared in a thousand different forms. Now as the “veiled editor” himself, now the Dr. Morris of “Peter’s Letters,” and now as Baron Lauerwinkel, stabbing his contemporaries under the guise of a German commentator. Against all the members of the “Cockney School,” a personal invective was habitually employed by him, at which in these calmer days of drier criticism we can only stand aghast. He says of Leigh Hunt, “The very concubine of so impure a wretch would be to be pitied; but, alas, for the wife of such a husband!”--and so forth.