I saw Blackwood yesterday, and Hogg the day before, and I understand from them you think of resigning the Chronicle department of the Magazine. Blackwood told me that if you did not like that part of the duty, he would consider himself accountable for the same sum he had specified to you for any other articles you might communicate from time to time. He proposes that Hogg should do the Chronicle: He will not do it so well as you, for he wants judgment and caution, and likes to have the appearance of eccentricity where eccentricity is least graceful; that, however, is Blackwood's affair. If you really do not like the Chronicle, there can be no harm in your giving it up. What strikes me is, that there is a something certain in having such a department to conduct, whereas you may sometimes find yourself at a loss when you have to cast about for a subject every month. Blackwood _is_ rather in a bad pickle just now--sent to Coventry by the trade, as the booksellers call themselves, and all about the parody of the two beasts.[92] {p.221} Surely these gentlemen think themselves rather formed of porcelain clay than of common potter's ware. Dealing in satire against all others, their own dignity suffers so cruelly from an ill-imagined joke! If B. had good books to sell, he might set them all at defiance. His Magazine does well, and beats Constable's: but we will talk of this when we meet.[93] [Footnote 92: An article in one of the early numbers of _Blackwood's Magazine_, entitled _The Chaldee MS._, in which the literati and booksellers of Edinburgh were quizzed _en masse_--Scott himself among the rest. It was in this lampoon that Constable first saw himself designated in print by the _sobriquet_ of "The Crafty," long before bestowed on him by one of his own most eminent Whig supporters; but nothing nettled him so much as the passages in which he and Blackwood are represented entreating the support of Scott for their respective Magazines, and waved off by "the Great Magician" in the same identical phrases of contemptuous indifference. The description of Constable's visit to Abbotsford may be worth transcribing--for Sir David Wilkie, who was present when Scott read it, says he was almost choked with laughter, and he afterwards confessed that the Chaldean author had given a sufficiently accurate version of what really passed on the occasion:--