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Boz was always glad to gibbet a notorious public abuse, and here was an opportunity. Maginn's friend, Kenealey, wrote to an American, who was about to edit Maginn's writings, "You have a glorious opportunity, where you have no fear of libel before your eyes. Maginn's best things can never be published till his victims have passed from the scene." How significant is this!

The conception is terrible enough, but by no means a novel one, as all readers conversant with the pages of this Magazine will readily allow, by reference to the story of "The Man in the Bell," in our tenth volume, one of the late Dr Maginn's most powerful and graphic sketches.

But Maginn's shorter stories in Blackwood, especially the inimitable "Story without a Tail," are charming; his more serious critical work, especially that on Shakespeare, displays a remarkable combination of wide reading, critical acumen, and sound sense; and his miscellanies in prose and verse, especially the latter, are characterised by a mixture of fantastic humour, adaptive wit, and rare but real pathos and melody, which is the best note of the specially Irish mode.

"Do you mind the way you wanted to go to Cambridge, an' I wouldn't let you," and "Do you mind the time you took the woollen balls from Mr. Maginn's house?...." Henry remembered. Mr. Maginn, the vicar of Ballymartin, had invited Henry to spend the afternoon with his nephew and niece and some other children.

Then Pott's "combining his information," his "cramming" critic, his using the lore of the Encyclopedia Britannica for his articles suggest Maginn's classical lucubrations. A well-known eminent Litterateur, to whom I suggested this view, objected that Pott is not shown to be such a blackguard as Maginn, and that Maginn was not such an ass as Pott. But Boz generalised his borrowed originals.

The collections of Maginn's work are anything but exhaustive, and the work itself suffers from all the drawbacks, probable if not inevitable, of work written in the intervals of carouse, at the last moment, for ephemeral purposes. Yet it is instinct with a perhaps brighter genius than the more accomplished productions of some much more famous men.

I'd starve to death if all men were like you." And Potts went away with a dim impression that he had injured Maginn rather more than Mr. Dingus. Coroner Maginn's condition, however, is one of chronic discontent. Upon the occasion of a recent encounter with him I said to him, "Business seems to be dull to-day, Mr. Maginn." "Dull! Well, that's just no name for it.