The effect of the new number was instantaneous and extraordinary. There is next to nobody living now who remembers personally the commotion and tumult in Edinburgh over the Chaldee Manuscript, but many still remember to have heard of it from their elders, with such remains of the old excitement, amusement, triumph, or wrath, which, fifty years later, it needed only a word to recall, and which were almost inconceivable in their warmth after so long an interval. My mother was a fervent Liberal, and therefore completely opposed to ‘Blackwood's Magazine’; also a woman much out of the world, living in the country, and but slenderly acquainted, I imagine, with the subjects of the satire; yet her laugh over it, and her remembrance of it, made it familiar to me long before I saw a word of it in print. It was one of the old brilliant things “such as you never hear of nowadays” of her youth; and I am afraid the trials for libel, the tremendous wounds thus lightly inflicted, the outcries and complaints, were to the temper of her generation only a charm the more. Edinburgh woke up next morning with a roar of laughter, with a shout of delight, with convulsions of rage and offence. There seems to have been nothing particularly noted in the Magazine—though the number was full of good and bad things—but this. It ran through every group of men and into every company like wildfire.