Moreover, this first period of enthusiastic exploration did not merely produce the lectures of Coleridge and Hazlitt, and the unsurpassed essays of Lamb, the hardly surpassed ones of Leigh Hunt. It produced also, by the combined efforts of a band of somewhat less distinguished persons, a periodical publication of very considerable bulk and of almost unique value and interest. It is not for nothing that while old magazines and reviews are usually sold for less than the cost of their binding, and not much more than their value as waste-paper, _The Retrospective Review_[543] still has respectable, though of course not fantastic, prices affixed to it in the catalogues. It was started in 1820, under the editorship of Henry Southern,[544] a diplomatist from the Cantabrigian Trinity, and of the antiquary afterwards so well known as Sir Harris Nicolas. Opening with a first volume of extraordinary excellence, it kept up for seven years and fourteen volumes, on a uniform principle. The second series, however, which was started after I know not what breach of continuity,[545] was less fortunate, and extends to two volumes only, though these contain much more matter apiece than the earlier ones. It is not uncommon to find these two volumes, and even some of the first series, wanting in library sets, which librarians should do their best to complete; for though, toward the end, the purely antiquarian matter encroached a very little upon the literary, there is not a volume from first to last which does not contain literary matter of the highest interest and value.[546]