ting no store by it." But columns might be filled with good things from his abundant store.

He

He was a fast friend, an affectionate husband and father, a faithful pastor, a good man. was equal to every vicissitude of fortune and every emergency in life, and he never consciously misused his power of satire and humor. It was something in his day to preach liberal ideas and hatred of oppression, but he did it without fear or faltering. His writings are worthy of study, and he is worthy of remembrance and honor.

WILLIAM GIFFORD

AND THE "QUARTERLY."

To mention the Edinburgh Review is also to remember its great rival, the Quarterly, that still exists and flourishes in all its original vigor.

Sir Walter Scott was the first to suggest the Review. He had at first supported and conributed to the Edinburgh, but when, under the influence of Jeffrey, Smith, and Brougham, that periodical became radical in its politics and an ardent advocate of the Whig party, the Tories of Edinburgh became greatly angered, kicked the Review out of doors, and looked about for some means of starting an opposition. Scott opened a correspondence with some of his London friends, got John Murray to be the publisher, and in 1809 the Quarterly made its first appearance under the editorship of William Gifford. The principal contributors in the beginning were Scott, John Wilson Croker, Canning, then at the beginning of his career as a statesman, and Southey. The

latter was for many years one of the mainstays of the Review, as, indeed, it was to him. It was in the pages of the Quarterly that Southey's life of Lord Nelson first appeared.

But the man who gave the Review its peculiar tone and character was the editor, William Gifford, a name now tolerably well forgotten, but which was once the synonym for savage and unsparing

criticism.

William Gifford was born in Devonshire in 1757 and was of extremely humble birth. Left an orphan in childhood he commenced life first as a cabin-boy on a sailing vessel, and then he became a shoemaker. A bright and clever boy, he soon attracted the attention of the village surgeon, who interested himself in him sufficiently to provide means for his education. He was finally sent to Oxford, and after taking his degree went to London to engage in literary pursuits.

There was at this time a fantastic set of poetasters and scribblers for the papers and magazines called "The Della Cruscans," who posed as the great poets and writers of the day, and were most extravagantly praised by their friends and admirers. It was a sort of mutual admiration society, and their jingling rhymes passed muster because there was nothing else written. Under the pseudonyms

of Della Crusca, Anna Matilda, Benedict, Cesario, The Bard, etc., these poems appeared first in the poet's corner of the newspapers and were then collected and published in a volume styled "The British Album." This was in the year 1790.

The writers were all very respectable people, among them being Robert Merry, Hannah Crowley and Mrs. Piozzi, but they wrote the most driveling rubbish that was ever seen in print.

Gifford undertook to satirize this crew and published two poems, "The Baviad" and "The Maeviad," after the style of Pope's "Dunciad," and as Scott says in his journal, "squaboshed at one blow the coxcombs who had humbugged the world long enough."

This performance gave Gifford a considerable reputation as a satirist and he next became associated with George Canning and J. Hookham Frere in the publication of the Anti-Jacobin, a Tory newspaper of great power and brilliancy.

At the time Gifford became the editor of the Quarterly he was in his fifty-second year. Scott describes him as "a little man, dumpled up together and so ill-made as to seem almost deformed, but with a singular expression of talent in his countenance.'

His enemies, and he had hosts of them, when

they tired of calling him a cobbler, called him Æsop. Such were the amenities of politics and of criticism in the early days of the nineteenth century. For fifteen years Gifford conducted the Quarterly with a zeal and an unscrupulousness that made him the most feared and hated man of his time. He had great controversial talent, a keen eye for blunders, a thorough knowledge of English, and a command of invective rarely equaled. He shot poisoned arrows, and the wounds made never healed. We have no record that any of the enemies he made was ever reconciled to him or forgave him.

The object of the Review being to antagonize the Whigs in every possible way and to support the Tory party unflinchingly, books written by men known to be liberal in their political views were unmercifully castigated, while the Tory writers were praised to the skies. Almost every writer whose works are now classic, and part of the treasures of English literature, writers like Shelley, Keats, Lamb, Hazlit, Leigh Hunt, and Wordsworth, were scathingly denounced and ridiculed in the Review. Byron and Gifford were on good terms, though Byron was a radical. His poems were lauded, but the fact that Murray was his publisher might have had something to do with that.