In spite of the “Quarterly’s” attack--partly no doubt in consequence of it--“Pencillings by the Way” met, on the whole, with a generous reception from the English public, and even from the English press. Literary criticism in those days was largely influenced by political prejudice. It was useless for a Whig, a “Cockney,” or an American, to hope for justice from the Tory reviews. The “Westminster” (Radical) was edited by Willis’s friend, Dr. Bowring; the “Edinburgh” (Whig), by his acquaintance, Lord Jeffrey. The former accordingly greeted his book with warm approval, and the latter praised it with faint damns. On the other hand, “Fraser’s,” the lightest and brightest of the Tory organs, received it with uproarious contempt. The notice of “Pencillings” in the February number of the magazine for 1836 was by Maginn,--the “Odoherty” of the “Noctes,”--a witty Irish blackguard, the hired bravo of the Tory press, who spent his time, except when drunk or in jail for debt, in writing lampoons and rollicking songs for “Blackwood” and “Fraser,” expressive chiefly of convivial joys and of boisterous scorn of the Whigs. There was a flavor of whiskey and Donnybrook about whatever Maginn wrote, and he wielded his blackthorn with such droll abandon that his victims could hardly help laughing, while rubbing their heads. His onslaught on “Pencillings” began, “This is really a goose of a book, or if anybody wishes the idiom to be changed, a book of a goose. There is not a single idea in it, from the first page to the last, beyond what might germinate in the brain of a washerwoman.” He then goes on to call the author a lickspittle, a “beggarly skittler,” a jackass, a ninny, a haberdasher, a “namby-pamby writer in twaddling albums, kept by the moustachioed and strong-smelling widows or bony matrons of Portland Place;” a “fifty-fifth rate scribbler of gripe-visited sonnets,” a “windy-gutted visitor,” and a “sumph,” whatever that mystic monosyllable may import.[3] His writing is characterized as “chamber-maid gabble,” “small beer,” “penny-trumpet eloquence,” “Willis’s bray,” and “Niagara in a jordan.” President Jackson, whom Maginn supposes to have appointed Willis _attaché_ to the French embassy, is “that most open-throated of flummery-gulpers, Old Hickory.” Alluding to a passage in Willis’s “slimy preface,” the reviewer says, “that Willis should literally set his foot on Lockhart’s head is what we think no one imagines the silly man to have meant. The probabilities are that if the imposition of feet should take place between them, the toe of Lockhart would find itself in disgusting contact with a part of Willis which is considerably removed from his head, and deemed to be the quarter in which the honor of such persons is most peculiarly called into action.” Such were the amenities of criticism half a century ago. Of course this animated billingsgate could not hurt Willis in anybody’s esteem, and called for no reply. Maginn was a