THE QUARTERLY REVIEW
If Macaulay represents a new Edinburgh from the days of Jeffrey, Brougham, and Sydney Smith, the variety of criticism embraced by the Quarterly is even more startling. There was more malice, and far coarser personalities in the early days, and almost continuously while Gifford, Croker, and Lockhart held the reins: it is—almost certainly— among these three that the responsibility for our "anonymous" group of onslaughts may be distributed. The two earliest appreciations of Jane Austen (from Scott and Whately) offer an interlude—actually in the same period—which positively startles us by the honesty of its attempt at fair criticism and the entire freedom from personality.
Gladstone's interesting recognition of Tennyson, and the "Church in Arms" against Darwin (so ably pleaded by Wilberforce), belong to yet another school of criticism which comes much nearer to our day, though retaining the solemnity, the prolixity, and the ex cathedra assumption of authority with which all the Reviews began their career; and is singularly cautious in its independence.