, and the young philosophers then had to wait until it
became exhausted enough to descend.

The literary ambition of young Aberdeen found for itself a very sedate
and respectable looking organ in "_The Aberdeen Magazine_," published
monthly during the years 1831 and 1832, and still visible in two thick
octavo volumes. Spalding was not to be tempted into this project, though
there was a slight touch in it supposed, solely from internal evidence,
to have come from him. A heavy controversy was begun by one calling
himself "a classical reformer," who brought up foemen worthy of his
steel. At the end of the whole was a sting in a postscript, more
effective than anything in the unwieldy body it was attached to. P. S.
As I am no great scholar, perhaps your classical Reformer will have the
goodness to tell me where I can see _The Works of Socrates_. He seems to
allude to them twice [reference to pages]. As he modestly tells us that
he is a much better translator of Homer than Pope was, perhaps he will
be kind enough to favour the world with a translation, to use his own
words, of "those works which have immortalized the name of
Socrates."[xvii-1]

The papers in the Aberdeen Magazine were not all of the sombre cumbrous
kind. There was an infusion of fresh young blood, fired perhaps by the
influence of Wilson and Lockhart in Blackwood's Magazine, but seeking
original forms of its own. For the leader of this school, Spalding had
both esteem and admiration, but it was for far other merits than those
of the brisk unrestrained writer of fugitive literature. This was Joseph
Robertson, afterwards distinguished as an archaeologist. He survived
Spalding eight years. No lines of study could well be in more opposite
directions than those of the two men who respected each other. While
Spalding revelled in all that was brightest and best in literature and
art, Robertson devoted himself to the development of our knowledge about
the period when the higher arts--those of the painter and the
sculptor--had been buried with the higher liter