In 1808 a scheme of great magnitude was under contemplation by Murray and the Ballantynes. It was a uniform edition of the "British Novelists," beginning with De Foe, and ending with the novelists at the close of last century; with biographical prefaces and illustrative notes by Walter Scott. A list of the novels, written in the hand of John Murray, includes thirty-six British, besides eighteen foreign authors. The collection could not have been completed in less than two hundred volumes. The scheme, if it did not originate with Walter Scott, had at least his cordial support.

Mr. Murray not unreasonably feared the cost of carrying such an undertaking to completion. It could not have amounted to less than twenty thousand pounds. Yet the Ballantynes urged him on. They furnished statements of the cost of printing and paper for each volume. "It really strikes me," said James Ballantyne, "the more I think of and examine it, to be the happiest speculation that has ever been thought of."

This undertaking eventually fell through. Only the works of De Foe were printed by the Messrs. Ballantyne, and published by Mr. Murray. The attention of the latter became absorbed by a subject of much greater importance to him—the establishment of the Quarterly Review. This for a time threw most of his other schemes into the shade.

CHAPTER V

ORIGIN OF THE "QUARTERLY REVIEW"

The publication of a Tory Review was not the result of a sudden inspiration. The scheme had long been pondered over. Mr. Canning had impressed upon Mr. Pitt the importance of securing the newspaper press, then almost entirely Whiggish or Revolutionary, on the side of his administration. To combat, in some measure, the democratic principles then in full swing, Mr. Canning, with others, started, in November 1797, the Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner.

The Anti-Jacobin ceased to be published in 1798, when Canning, having been appointed Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, found his time fully occupied by the business of his department, as well as by his parliamentary duties, and could no longer take part in that clever publication.

Four years later, in October 1802, the first number of the Edinburgh Review was published. It appeared at the right time, and, as the first quarterly organ of the higher criticism, evidently hit the mark at which it aimed. It was conducted by some of the cleverest literary young men in Edinburgh—Jeffrey, Brougham, Sydney Smith, Francis Horner, Dr. Thomas Brown, and others. Though Walter Scott was not a founder of the Review, he was a frequent contributor.

In its early days the criticism was rude, and wanting in delicate insight; for the most part too dictatorial, and often unfair. Thus Jeffrey could never appreciate the merits of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge. "This will never do!" was the commencement of his review of Wordsworth's noblest poem. Jeffrey boasted that he had "crushed the 'Excursion.'" "He might as well say," observed Southey, "that he could crush Skiddaw." Ignorance also seems to have pervaded the article written by Brougham, in the second number of the Edinburgh, on Dr. Thomas Young's discovery of the true principles of interferences in the undulatory theory of light. Sir John Herschell, a more competent authority, said of Young's discovery, that it was sufficient of itself to have placed its author in the highest rank of scientific immortality.

The situation seemed to Mr. Murray to warrant the following letter: