ANONYMOUS
We have hinted already that the responsibility for this group of ill-mannered recriminations may probably be distributed between Gifford, Croker, and Lockhart. It is curious to notice that the second attack on Scott appeared after his admission to the ranks of contributors; and the author of Waverley is perhaps the one man said to have friends both on the Edinburgh and the Quarterly. That on Leigh Hunt, always the pet topic of Toryism, from whom he certainly provoked some retaliation, is only paralleled in Blackwood. We have included the Shakespeare and the Moxon as attractively brief samples on the approved model of savage banter, and the Jane Eyre as perhaps the most flagrant example of bad taste to be found in these merciless pages. It was George Henry Lewis, by the way, who so much offended Charlotte Brontë by the greeting, "There ought to be a bond between us, for we have both written naughty books."
It is interesting to find Thackeray among those it was permitted to praise: though the "moral" objection to his "realism" reveals a strange attitude.
We may notice, with some surprise, that the attitude towards George
Eliot is nearly as hostile as towards Charlotte Brontë.