_North_. You do us too much honour. Yet reflect, Mr. Landor. After the character you have given us, would you verily seek to be of our fraternity? You who have denounced us so grandiloquently--you who claim credit for lofty and disinterested principles of action? Recollect that you have represented us as the worthy men who have turned into ridicule Lamb, Keats, Hazlitt, Coleridge--(diverse metals curiously graduated!)--all in short, who, recently dead, are now dividing among them the admiration of their country. Whatever could lessen their estimation; whatever could injure their fortune; whatever could make their poverty more bitter; whatever could tend to cast down their aspirations after fame; whatever had a tendency to drive them to the grave which now has opened to them, was incessantly brought into action against them by _us_ zealots for religion and laws. A more deliberate, a more torturing murder, never was committed, than the murder of Keats. The chief perpetrator of his murder knew beforehand that he could not be hanged for it. These are your words, Mr. Landor. _Landor_.--I do not deny them. _North_.--And in regard to the taste of the common public for Blackwood's Cordials, you have said that, to those who are habituated to the gin-shop, the dram is sustenance, and they feel themselves both uncomfortable and empty without the hot excitement. _Blackwood's_ is really a gin-palace. _Landor_.--All this I have both said and printed, and the last sentence you have just read from my satire is preceded by one that you have not read. An exposure of the impudence and falsehood of _Blackwood's Magazine_ is not likely to injure its character, _or diminish the number of its subscribers_; and in this sentence you have the secret of my desire to become a contributor to _Blackwood_. I want a popular vehicle to convey my censures to the world, especially on Wordsworth. I do not pretend to have any love for you and your brotherhood, Mr. North. But I dislike you less than I do Wordsworth; and I frankly own to you, that the fame of that man is a perpetual blister to my self-love. _North_.--Your habitual contemplation of his merits has confused you into a notion that they are your own, and you think him an usurper of the laurel crown that is yours by the divine right of genius. What an unhappy monomania! Still, your application for redress to us is unaccountable. You should know that we Black Foresters, lawless as you may suppose us, are Wordsworth's liegemen. He is our intellectual Chief. We call him the General! We are ever busy in promoting his fame. _Landor_.--You are always blowing hot and cold on it, and have done so for years past. One month you place him among the stars, the next as low as the daisies. _North_.--And rightly too; for both are the better for his presence. _Landor_.--But you alternately worship and insult him, as some people do their wooden idols.