He designed to ornament his first number with—
“A print of my Lord Monboddo in his quadruped form. I must, therefore, most earnestly beg that you will purchase for me a copy of it in some of the Macaroni print shops. It is not to be procured at Edinburgh. They are afraid to vend it here. We are to take it on the footing of a figure of an animal, not yet described; and are to give a grave, yet satirical account of it, in the manner of Buffon. It would not be proper to allude to his lordship but in a very distant manner.”
It was not, however, ventured on; and the nondescript animal was still confined to the windows of “the Macaroni print shops.” It was, however, the bloom of the author’s fancy, and promised all the mellow fruits it afterwards produced.
In September this ardour did not abate:—
“The proposals are issued; the subscriptions in the booksellers’ shops astonish; correspondents flock in; and, what will surprise you, the timid proprietors of the ‘Scots’ Magazine’ have come to the resolution of dropping their work. You stare at all this, and so do I too.”
Thus he flatters himself he is to annihilate his rival, without even striking the first blow. The appearance of his first number is to be the moment when their last is to come forth. Authors, like the discoverers of mines, are the most sanguine creatures in the world: Gilbert Stuart afterwards flattered himself Dr. Henry was lying at the point of death from the scalping of his tomahawk pen; but of this anon.
On the publication of the first number, in November, 1773, all is exultation; and an account is facetiously expected that “a thousand copies had emigrated from the Row and Fleet-street.”
There is a serious composure in the letter of December, which seems to be occasioned by the tempered answer of his London correspondent. The work was more suited to the meridian of Edinburgh; and from causes sufficiently obvious, its personality and causticity. Stuart, however, assures his friend that “the second number you will find better than the first, and the third better than the second.”
The next letter is dated March 4, 1774, in which I find our author still in good spirits:—