was entered by consent for the plaintiff, with damages forty shillings, each party paying his own costs.
Besides these forensic tourneys, the litigant parties had recourse to a more direct and speedy mode of settling their differences. On hearing of the assault on Fraser, Maginn at once wrote to Berkeley, avowing the authorship of the objectionable article. A challenge, in that day at least, was the almost inevitable result. The meeting took place in a field on the New Barnet Road, when three exchanges of shots took place between the belligerents, without further damage than a graze on the heel of Maginn's boot, and one on the collar of his adversary's coat. Bad blood ahvays remained between the antagonists. In the year following the trial, Maginn again appeared in Fraser with a more carefully guarded, but still truculent, attack on the Berkeley family; for which Henry F. Berkeley took revenge by stigmatizing the critic as "a blackguard hireling of the most profligate part of the press, a stipendary assassin of character, and a mean and malignant liar." Years after, when Grantley Berkeley came to write his Reminiscences, he wove together that tissue of lies and misrepresentations, relating to Maginn and Miss Landon, which the late Mr. Gruneisen so conclusively pulled to pieces in the Globe or Pall Mall Gazette (?). Grantley Berkeley died so recently as Feb. 23, 1881, at the advanced age of 81.[1]
The report in full of the trial will be found in Fraser's Magazine for Jan., 1837; followed by Maginn's "defence," such as it is.
To the Drawing-Room Scrap-Book for 1836, then edited by Miss Landon ("L. E. L."), Maginn contributed a poetical piece on the subject of Albertus Magnus, at the age of 84, suddenly becoming aware, in the presence of his class of pupils at Cologne, of the death, in 1274, of his former pupil, St. Thomas Aquinas, " the Angelical Doctor," and bursting into tears. Perhaps also by the same pen are the lines signed " W. M.," The Farewell, page 33.
Turning again to Fraser's Magazine, in Nos. xcvi., xcvii. and xcix., appeared that marvellous farrago of Rabelaisian wit and learning, " The Doctor," a conjectural review of, and commentary upon, the celebrated work of Southey, the authorship of which was then not known. But it is impossible to give anything like a complete list of Maginn's contributions to Regina, of which he was, from the commencement, the very soul and presiding spirit. Again, in Blackwood (vol. xlviii.) we have his "Tobias Correspondence," which, as he himself said, " contains the whole art and mystery of writing a newspaper; " this was written in a garret in Wych Street, when hiding from the emissaries of the law, and is pregnant with his own diversified literary experiences. Here, too, (vol. xi.) I would point to his inimitable song (see Appendix C), "The Wine Bibber's Glory," in English, and rhyming Latin verse, equal to anything of Walter de Mapes or Vincent Bourne, and reminding one of the choicest gems in the Eloge de l'Yvresse, or the Vaux de Vire of the old Norman Anacreon, Olivier Basselin.
Space will not allow me to trace the course of Maginn through the volumes of Blackwood. In vol. vii. is his Latin version of "Chevy Chase,
- ↑ See the obituary notice in the Times. In 1871, Mortimer Collins dedicated his clever novel, Marquis and Merchant, "to the Honourable Grantley Fitzhardinge Berkeley, who, both in Life and Literature, shows the true meaning of the Adage—'Whom the Gods love die young." "This little enigma may be safely left for my readers to solve.
