In 1833, Blackwood was still full of schemes and enterprises; he commenced the publication of Alison’s “History of Europe.” Only the first two volumes were published, and then not altogether successfully, when Blackwood was stricken down by a mortal disease, a tumour in the groin, which, in a weary illness of four months, exhausted his physical energies, but left his temper calm and unruffled, and his intellect vigorous to the last. He was attended by Moir--the sweet-toned “Delta” of his magazine--who had another dying patient scarce a hundred yards off. This was Galt, who had been personally estranged from Blackwood by rough advice and strictures as to one of his stories. Now, however, that they lay dying so near each to each, the old friendliness returned, and Moir bore pleasant messages and hopeful wishes from one bedside to another. They never met again. Galt lingered on for years, but Blackwood died on the 10th of September, 1834, in the fifty-seventh year of his age. We have already given his character as described by those who knew him best, and it were idle to add any weaker testimony. He left a widow and a family of seven sons and two daughters, many of them very young; and the management of the business devolved upon the two elder, Robert and Alexander, who had for some years been associated with their father. Until 1845, these gentlemen were at the head of the flourishing business, and with such a start they could not fail to succeed. The magazine, in spite of all rivals, continued to be as great a favourite as ever, though in a year or so after the death of the elder Blackwood, Wilson withdrew almost entirely from its pages, and his position was eventually occupied by his son-in-law, Professor Aytoun. Many new contributors, without distinction of sect or party, were added to the staff; and even Douglas Jerrold and Walter Savage Landor--ultra-radicals, both--were made free of its pages. John Sterling, “our new contributor,” as Wilson fondly called him, fully retained the old reputation for deliciously sparkling poems and essays; and Lord Lytton, in the “Poems and Ballads of Schiller,” kept alive the cosmopolitan spirit of poetry inaugurated by Lockhart. In 1845, Alexander Blackwood died, and was shortly afterwards followed by his brother, when John, the third son, the present proprietor of the business and the present editor of _Blackwood_, who was born in 1818, succeeded. So popular had _Maga_ become in the colonies, and more especially in the United States, that a reprint of it was regularly published there every month. Mr. John Blackwood took counsel with the American lawyers, obtained an American contributor, and then threatened the Yankee publisher with all the terrors of the law, if the number were pirated as usual--a successful step, for ever since that date a tribute tithe has been regularly paid for the right of republication. A branch house was started in London; the firm was also increased by the