There had never perhaps been a time when a band of contributors more active and productive surrounded the Editor of the Magazine. There was no onslaught upon the world, as in the old days when Wilson or Lockhart or Maginn was always in the act of couching a lance, and generally a very sharp one, if not at any one in particular, yet at the culpable vagaries of the Whigs and the world. And, to tell the truth, ‘Maga’ never lost her love for a bit of keen criticism, or, above all, for a critic who could employ the arts of ridicule to advantage and laugh an adversary into fury; but times and tempers were milder than in former days, and the slashing article had died out as a branch of literature. Fiction was exceptionally strong in a cycle which had secured the three best novels of Bulwer and the new sensation of the ‘Scenes of Clerical Life’; and the soldiers and travellers, and all the adventurous kind of the brothers of the pen, always welcome in the Magazine, and for whom up to the present time it has retained its partiality, thronged about that lively centre of literary life. Three brothers Hamley and three brothers Chesney, all soldiers, flowed into the ranks. Mr White, the author of ‘Sir Frizzle Pumpkin,’ half soldier, half clergyman, laughed and jested his way through many a pleasant article.