of poetry they are exceedingly clever, and justify Matthew Arnold's character of them as ‘genuine poems;’ but if intended as restorations of the genuine spirit of Homer, they deserve all the withering scorn heaped upon them by the same critic as dismal perversions of the Homeric spirit. They certainly served to explode the conception of Homer as a kind of Greek ‘Blind Harry.’ If this service on Maginn's part was unintentional, it must be admitted that his notes display much scholarship and much acuteness. They were considerably abridged when the ballads were published separately in 1850, and the editor also allowed himself liberties with the text. A much more successful, though much less known experiment, followed in 1839: a series of reproductions of Lucian's Dialogues in the form of blank-verse comedies. Here the tone throughout is most felicitous, but the general effect was too refined for the average reader; and while the ‘Homeric Ballads’ have been reprinted and much discussed, the Lucianic comediettas have disappeared without leaving a trace, except Peacock's manifest imitation in his version of the ‘Querolus.’ It is even said that some were returned to him by the publisher of the magazine, a liberty which Fraser would not have presumed to take a few years before. Maginn was evidently going down. The death of L. E. Landon, over whose life he had, inadvertently or otherwise, thrown so deep a shadow [see Landon, L. E.], is said to have occasioned him intense grief. He wrote more than ever in the ‘Age’ and ‘Argus,’ compromised what little character for consistency he possessed by contributing at the same time to the radical ‘True Sun,’ and eventually gave the full measure of his political cynicism in the ‘Tobias Correspondence’ in ‘Blackwood,’ which he declared to contain ‘the whole art and mystery of editing a newspaper.’ This clever production was written while hiding from bailiffs in a garret in Wych Street. His circumstances were indeed desperate; he had broken with ‘Fraser;’ the conservatives, perhaps on account of his connection with disreputable journalism, refused to assist him by place or pension; private aid from the king of Hanover, Sir Robert Peel, Lockhart, Thackeray, and others, proved insufficient; thrown into a debtors' prison, he was compelled to obtain his discharge as an insolvent, and emerged broken-hearted and in an advanced stage of consumption. He retired to Walton-on-Thames, where he died on 21 Aug. 1842. His last moments should have been cheered by a munificent donation of 100l. from Sir Robert Peel, but there is reason to believe that this was never communicated to him. Lockhart wrote his epitaph in lines whose superficial burlesque cannot conceal their real feeling. Two years afterwards, ‘John Manesty,’ a novel of Liverpool life in the eighteenth century, was published in his name by his widow, with a dedication to Lockhart. Editorship and dedication should insure its genuineness, but it is utterly unworthy of his powers, and, though illustrated by Cruikshank, has fallen into total oblivion.
Maginn's biographers, S. C. Hall excepted, have dealt kindly with him, but his character is scarcely a more agreeable spectacle than his life. His dissipation might be forgiven, but it is not so easy to overlook the discredit he brought upon the profession of letters by his systematic want of principle, his insensibility to the courtesies and amenities of life, in a word, by the extreme debasement of his standard in everything but scholarship. Thackeray's portrait of him as ‘Captain Shandon’ in ‘Pendennis’ is probably the best which we possess; the vague encomiums of his other friends, Lockhart's epitaph excepted, seem mainly prompted by good nature. His faculties were undoubtedly extraordinary; they were those of an accomplished scholar grafted on a brilliant improvisatore, the compound constituting a perfectly ideal magazinist. Exuberant to the verge of extravagance, he could provide inexhaustible entertainment on any number of topics; his humour made the most ephemeral trifles interesting for the moment, and his learning and critical discrimination gave weight to his more serious disquisitions. His extreme facility inevitably prejudiced him as an artist. He has left only two works of imagination perfect in their respective styles: ‘The City of the Demons,’ and ‘Bob Burke's Duel with Ensign Brady,’ perhaps the raciest Irish story ever written. Half a dozen more like it would have won him a high reputation. Some of his critical papers are valuable; in others, such as that on ‘Lady Macbeth,’ he seems inspired by the spirit of paradox; ‘O'Doherty's Maxims’ are a piquant parody of Rochefoucauld; but he will probably be best remembered by the ‘Gallery of Literary Characters’ as republished by Professor Bates, where Maginn's sarcastic personalities, Maclise's pictorial mastery, and the editor's genial erudition combine to make ‘the threefold cord that is not soon broken.’ His ‘Miscellanies’ were edited in five volumes by Dr. Shelton Mackenzie, New York, 1855–1857, and a selection in two volumes was edited by R. W. Montagu, London, 1885.
