Early History of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Alice Mary Doane

[71] Ibid., V. i, p. 122

[72] A. Lang: Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart, V. i, p. 161

Just who wrote the Chaldee will never be known; but all indications are that the idea and first draft were James Hogg’s, and that it was touched up and completed by Wilson and Lockhart, with the aid, or rather with the suggestions and approval of William Blackwood.

The number for August 1821 contains the first of a series of “Familiar Epistles to Christopher North, From an Old Friend with a New Face.”[75] Letter I deals with Hogg’s Memoirs. This is anticipating a bit, anticipating some four years, in fact, but is nevertheless apropos of our discussion of the Chaldee. Just who the Old Friend with a New Face was would be hard to judge. Mr. Lang has surmised him to be either Lockhart or De Quincey. It is a lively bit of work, worthy the wit of either, but the sentences do not feel like Lockhart’s. That both these men were friends of Hogg, encourages one to hope that the biting sarcasm of the thing was its own excuse for being, and came not from the heart. Such was ever the tone of “Maga”, however; and none can deny that once begun the article must be read! Excerpts follow: “Of all speculations in the way of printed paper, I should have thought the most hopeless to have been ‘a Life of James Hogg, by himself’. Pray who wishes to know anything about his life? ...

“It is no doubt undeniable that the political state of Europe is not so interesting as it was some years ago. But still I maintain that there was no demand for the Life of James Hogg.... At all events, it ought not to have appeared before the Life of Buonaparte.”[76]

[75] Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, V. x, p. 43

[76] Same

But to come again to our Chaldee Manuscript, the correspondent says concerning Hogg’s claim to its authorship: “There is a bouncer!—The Chaldee Manuscript!—Why, no more did he write the Chaldee Manuscript than the five books of Moses.... I presume that Mr. Hogg is also the author of Waverley.—He may say so if he chooses.... It must be a delightful thing to have such fancies as these in one’s noodle;—but on the subject of the Chaldee Manuscript, let me now speak the truth. You yourself, Kit ... and myself, Blackwood and a reverend gentleman of this city alone know the perpetrator. It was the same person who murdered Begbie!”—Begbie, by the way, was a bank porter, whose murder was one of the never solved mysteries of Edinburgh. “It was a disease with him to excite 'public emotion’. With respect to his murdering Begbie ... all at once it entered his brain, that, by putting him to death in a sharp and clever and mysterious manner ... the city of Edinburgh would be thrown into a ferment of consternation, and there would be no end of ‘public emotion’.... The scheme succeeded to a miracle.... Mr. —— wrote the Chaldee Manuscript precisely on the same principle.... It was the last work of the kind of which I have been speaking, that he lived to finish. He confessed it and the murder the day before he died, to the gentleman specified, and was sufficiently penitent....