and Yellow" appeared. It was the literary sensation of the time.

It is difficult for us to appreciate the stir it made, we who are accustomed to the rise and fall of magazines and reviews, "when every day and year brings forth a new one," but our grandfathers or great-grandfathers thought it a most memorable event and looked upon the new wonder with feelings largely governed by their political bias. If they were Whigs they were exultant, if they were Tories they saw in it nothing but evil, and that continually. It was, or in time it became, the great organ of liberal opinion, and during its career was instrumental in bringing great and bcneficent reforms in English law. In politics and literature it became an immense power, far exceeding even the most extravagant dreams of the youths who founded it.

We now glance over those faded volumes and wonder at the sensation they made. Their fire has long been extinguished, their wit, their vigor, and keenness completely evaporated. We do not care to read them, or if there are among them an occasional article of literary excellence we prefer to read it in the collected works of the author.

With the second number, issued in January,

1803, Jeffrey became the editor, Smith having left Edinburgh to accept an English curacy.

Few men have held sway as a critic so long and so powerfully. To him, more than to any one person, is the success of the Review to be attributed. And when it is remembered that during all this period he was in the successful practice of an arduous profession, a leading advocate at the Scottish bar, that he wrote on almost every conceivable subject, that he was obliged to keep constant watch over his contributors, urging them to promptness, and touching up and sometimes rewriting their articles when received, we cannot but be amazed at his versatility and industry. It was no grudging compliment that Macaulay paid him when he wrote: "When I compare him with Sydney and myself I feel, with humility perfectly sincere, that his range is immeasurably wider than ours. And this only as a writer. But he is not only a writer; he has been a great advocate, and he is a great judge. Take him all in all, I think him more nearly a universal genius than any man of our time." This is, indeed, "praise from Sir Hubert Stanley," and is praise, indeed.

Sir Walter Scott was among the early contributors, but Jeffrey's liberal politics and notions of reform estranged the great novelist and caused

him to assist in setting up the Quarterly as a Tory organ.

Nevertheless the Edinburgh was the foremost periodical in Europe for a quarter of a century under Jeffrey's management, and the impulse and direction he gave it remains with it to this day.

In his criticism Jeffrey tried to be impartial and he never reviewed a book either from the "friendly" or the "business office" standpoint. He was a just judge, but often a severe one, though he never had the savage moods that characterized Gifford and Croker in the Quarterly. It was a criticism in the Edinburgh written by Brougham on "Hours of Idleness," that aroused the wrath of Byron and awakened his genius. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" proved that Byron could give as well as receive blows.

Health to immortal Jeffrey! once, in name,
England could boast a judge almost the same ;
In soul so like, so merciful, yet just,

Some think that Satan has resigned his trust,

And given the spirit to the world again,

To sentence letters as he sentenced men.

With hand less mighty, but with heart as black,
With voice as willing to decree the rack.

Byron's later poems met with Jeffrey's praise,

and an appreciative notice of Keats did much to remove the sting of the Quarterly's unjust attack on "Endymion." But Wordsworth, Southey, and even Scott felt the critic's lash, and the famous phrase, "This will never do," directed against "The Excursion," has survived to the present day. And, in truth, it takes a very ardent Wordsworthian to wade through that voluminous poem at the present day.

Many and famous have been the contributors to the Review, including the most eminent men in politics and literature Great Britain has produced. Macaulay won his first fame in its pages, and for nearly twenty years was its chief support. Carlyle was a contributor for a time, but he did not like the way Jeffrey sometimes slashed his articles and toned down his style, and took his wares elsewhere. Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Abraham Hayward, and Thackeray were also acceptable contributors.

Since the advent of the monthly reviews the Edinburgh may not have been so popular or so powerful as it once was, but it is to-day a verygreat organ of criticism and it commands attention throughout the English-speaking world.

FRANCIS JEFFREY,

GREAT EDITOR AND CRITIC.

(1773-1850).

FRANCIS JEFFREY's editorship of the Edinburgh Review from 1802 until 1829 was most notable and few men have held critical sway so long and so powerfully. During that period he wrote on general literature, biography, history, poetry, philosophy, jurisprudence, fiction, and politics. It was the period that saw the rise of the great romantic movement in English literature, led by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Scott, and Jeffrey bore his part in it as critic and commentator. He was in sympathy with the movement as a revolt from the so-called "correctness" of the eighteenth century literature, but he did not entirely approve of the methods and style of all the great writers we have mentioned. Some of them he praised while others felt the sharp sting of his criticism.