(7) [B.’s Refreshment Rooms, 10th January 1853.] My dear Messrs. P. & R.,--I must go to Edinburgh early in February. I cannot afford--so hard are my Publishers--to go in January. Besides, feasts without alcohol are like grates without coal. The man who, in this weather, can be pleased with lemonade and become poetic on ginger-pop, is fit for murder. He is wanting in the essential attributes of man. He can have no stomach or nerves, and far less heart, while his brains must be vapid as our friend’s Paste--he of the punch-bowl, I mean. Let Erskine by all means have unalcoholic swipes until his finger-ends distil foam, and his eyelids weep pure water. Let every teetotaller, if he pleases, sit all night up to his neck in a barrel of water, but do give something to cool the poor demons!--Yours truly, Author of ‘A Plea for Temperance.’ The _Christian Magazine_ gave way to _Good Words_, which was started in 1860. His assumption of the editorship proved to be the most important circumstance in Macleod’s career. Religious papers were the worst in existence, written by narrow saints, not incapable of theological malice, and ignorant of the world and of the age. _Good Words_, while leading men ‘to know and to love God,’ was to represent various schools of Christian thought, and make a point of human interest and scientific instruction. He had his eye on the intelligent mechanic, whom the evangelical prints repelled. The magazine was the mirror of the editor’s mind, full of spirituality, yet taking in with relish the outer world. For the most part the religion was manly and bracing, but there was enough of another kind to suit the feebler souls. And in the narratives (not to say novels) many a maiden aunt, who thought fiction in general of the devil, snatched a fearful joy. Poor as the early numbers were, _Good Words_ was successful from the first, reaching in two years a circulation of a hundred thousand. But the editor had to contend with virulent opposition on the part of the awful good. The stories were positively secular! Then the association of Tulloch and Stanley, Kingsley and Caird, covered the whole enterprise with suspicion. If Macleod did not give up these dangerous men he was to be crushed. And what could be said for a paper, supposed to be fit for Sunday perusal, which admitted articles in astronomy? Christian parents should not allow their children to handle on the Lord’s day a magazine that made so much of pagan luminaries like Jupiter and Mars. Private remonstrances poured in; the paper was tabooed by religious societies; the _Record_, an English champion of the faith, kept up for months a savage attack; and the General Assembly of the Free Church was overtured to sit upon _Good Words_, which it did, much to the increase of our circulation. The editor held his ground, only redoubling his anxiety to keep out ‘every expression that could pain the weakest Christian.’ Rather than publish a novel of Anthony Trollope’s, in