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. In 1804 Constable assumed as partner Alexander Gibson Hunter, of Blackness, and from that time the business was carried on under the title of Archibald Constable and Co. In the following year, 1805, he added to the list of his periodicals the _Medical and Surgical Journal_, a work projected in concert with Dr. Andrew Duncan, and which existed till 1855, when it was united to the _Medical Journal of Science_. It was in this year, also, that the firm published a poem, which was eventually to do more for the enlargement of their business and the honour of their name than even the famous _Review_ itself.