Note 92 — Chapter XLII

Footnote 92: An article in one of the early numbers of Blackwood's Magazine, entitled The Chaldee MS., in which the literati and booksellers of Edinburgh were quizzed en masse—Scott himself among the rest. It was in this lampoon that Constable first saw himself designated in print by the sobriquet of "The Crafty," long before bestowed on him by one of his own most eminent Whig supporters; but nothing nettled him so much as the passages in which he and Blackwood are represented entreating the support of Scott for their respective Magazines, and waved off by "the Great Magician" in the same identical phrases of contemptuous indifference. The description of Constable's visit to Abbotsford may be worth transcribing—for Sir David Wilkie, who was present when Scott read it, says he was almost choked with laughter, and he afterwards confessed that the Chaldean author had given a sufficiently accurate version of what really passed on the occasion:—