“One day,” writes Sydney Smith, “we happened to meet in the eighth or ninth storey (it was the third) of a flat in Buccleuch-place, the elevated residence of the then Mr. Jeffrey. I proposed that we should get up a review. This was acceded to with acclamations. I was appointed editor, and remained long enough in Edinburgh to edit the first number of the Edinburgh Review. The motto I proposed was—
‘Tenui musam meditamur avenâ.’
‘We cultivate literature upon a little oatmeal.’
But this was too near the truth to be admitted, and so we took our present grave motto from Publius Lyrus, of whom none of us had, I am sure, read a single line; and so began what has since turned out to be a very important and able journal. When I left Edinburgh it fell into the stronger hands of Lord Jeffrey and Lord Brougham, and reached the highest point of popularity and success.”
It was resolved to bring out the first number of the work in June, 1802; but its outset was surrounded with many difficulties, arising from want of experience in its chief conductors. The meetings of the conspirators were held in a little room off Willison’s (Constable’s father-in-law’s) office in Craig’s-court, to which each man was requested to steal singly, by whichever way would be least suspicious; and there they examined and criticised each other’s productions, and corrected the proof sheets as they were thrown off. Here it was that Jeffrey once rushed down excitedly into Willison’s printing-office, crying, “Where is your pepper-box, man—your pepper-box?” In vain the printer declared he had no such useful article on the premises; Jeffrey persisted that the proof sheets must have been dusted with commas from a pepper-box, so lavish had the printer been with his points. Through various delays, typographical and otherwise, the first number, as we have seen, did not appear until the following November.
Lord Brougham, in the first volume of his recently-published autobiography, flatly contradicts this account. “Nothing,” he says, “can be more imaginary than nearly the whole of it.” Still, when Sydney Smith published his version of the history, neither Lord Brougham nor any other person interested took the trouble to contradict it; and we are inclined to accept rather an account written within a short time of the foundation of the Review than to receive another version written by an octogenarian at an interval of more than half a century. A letter, moreover, of Sydney Smith’s, first published in the Athenæum of April 1st, 1871, shows clearly that the proprietors of the journal presented him “with books to the value of £100 (corrected to £114) as a memorial of their respect for having planned and contributed to a work which to them has been a source of reputation as well as of emolument.” On the other hand, Sydney Smith’s editorship certainly did not extend beyond the first number, and was probably even in that subject to the direction of Jeffrey.
The list of contributions to the first four numbers may, however, be accepted as indisputable evidence of Brougham’s enormous powers of work. To these four numbers he contributed twenty-one articles, besides portions of four others. Smith contributed eighteen, Jeffrey sixteen, and Horner seven. Brougham, too, kept up this rate of contribution more steadily than any of his colleagues. To the first twenty numbers he contributed no less than eighty articles, Jeffrey seventy-five, Smith twenty-three, and Horner fourteen. By this time the new periodical was fairly launched, and the additional services of such men as Playfair, Thomas Brown, Walter Scott, Hallam, Murray, and Stodhart, had been secured.
The extensive circulation and reputation of the Edinburgh Review was, Scott himself says, due to two circumstances; first that it was entirely uninfluenced by the booksellers; and, secondly, the regular payment of editor and contributors: Jeffrey receiving, from the commencement of his labours, £300 per annum (afterwards increased to £800), whilst every contributor was compelled, even if wealthy, to accept a minimum bonus of £10 (afterwards raised to £16) per sheet.
Never before had the enterprise of young and almost unknown men started so ambitious a scheme, and never since have pluck and learning, talent and genius been so amply rewarded. They found the world of English society, English literature, and English politics warped and dwarfed—scared by the French Revolution and the American Republic into a dormant state of Toryism—they found matters thus, and in an incredibly short time they almost changed the current of the national thought. Jeffrey, with his clear, legal mind, his startling and brilliant manner of expression, his sarcasm cold and sharp-edged as a Toledo blade, unfortunately only too capable of wounding too deeply—won the position of the greatest English critic of all time, and of the most eminent Scottish lawyer of the day—achieving the highest honours open to the advocates of Edinburgh. Brougham, with his ponderous learning, his marvellous versatility, his immense powers of work, became not only the first English lawyer, but one of the first English statesmen of his time. Sydney Smith, the wittiest man certainly of his century, might have attained the highest honours open to his calling, had he not preferred the more humble and more praiseworthy career of being a liberal clergyman at a time when the wearers of his cloth were one and all rank Tories to the backbone.
Constable, who had at first been rather startled and alarmed at the design of the Edinburgh Review, was not prepared, any more than the projectors themselves, for its immediate and splendid success. Without a publisher of his cast of mind the work, however, might have encountered some difficulties, and he was not slow to perceive, nor backward to follow, that line of conduct towards its conductors, without the observance of which the new relations between them could not long have been sustained harmoniously. The present proprietors of the work became, some years after its commencement, sharers of the property, but the publishing department remained, we believe, under his direction for many years.