Among Mr. Knight’s other literary labours at this time, in 1820, he undertook the editorship of the _Guardian_, again in partnership with a colleague; and his life, divided between Windsor and London, became one of very pleasurable excitement. His connection, too, with a literary journal, served to render him familiar with the aspects of the publishing trade in London, and at the end of 1822 he sold his share of the _Guardian_, and took up his position in Pall Mall East, and started as a publisher. One day, shortly after this, coming back jaded and weary from his London office he found two Eton lads--W. M. Praed and Walter Blunt--waiting at his cottage with an eager proposal that he should publish an Eton miscellany. Generously and sympathetically did Mr. Knight enter into the schemes of the schoolboys; and the plan of the _Etonian_ was forthwith drawn up. Knight found much pleasure in watching and assisting the young periodical, which was a kind of pleasant nursery ground for the growth and display of the youthful talent of which Eton then proudly and unwontedly boasted. “It was refreshing,” he writes, “after the dry labours of his day in town, to watch the bright, earnest, happy face of Mr. Blunt, who took a manifest delight in doing the editorial drudgery; the worst proofs (for in the haste unavoidable in periodical literature he would sometimes catch hold of a proof _un_read) never disturbed the serenity of his temper. To him it seemed a real happiness to stand at a desk in the composing-room.” But Praed it was, with his sparkling wit, his elegant aptness of expression, and his boyish gallantry that yet smacked of the wise experience of age, who was the life and soul of the project, and his contributions eventually occupied fully one-fourth of the whole miscellany, and when he went to Cambridge it was thought advisable, perhaps found necessary, to terminate the _Etonian_ altogether. Still Mr. Knight’s chief hopes as a publisher were centred in the promise of his young Eton friends, and during a week passed with them at Cambridge the general plan of _Knight’s Quarterly Magazine_ was settled, and he was introduced to Derwent, Coleridge, Malden, and Macaulay, afterwards his chief contributors. Mr. Knight was his own editor, and with the assistance of such writers, his periodical could not fail to be a success. Even Christopher North, in Edinburgh, was moved to write of them as a hopeful class of “young scholars,” and Knight retorted to this stale accusation of youth by declaring that he had read and rejected seventy-eight prose articles, and one hundred and twenty copies of occasional verses, “all the property of the old periodical press,” while Praed wrote saucily enough, that “Christopher North is a barn from his wig to his slippers.”