There is, however, one point on which we not only may but must draw special attention to them. There can be little doubt that these light velitations of theirs prepared the way and sharpened the taste for a very considerable refashioning and new-modelling of the regular critical-Periodical army which followed so soon. In this new-modelling some of them—Gifford, Canning, Ellis—were most important officers, and there can be no doubt at all that many others transferred, consciously or unconsciously, this lighter way of criticising from verse to prose, or kept it up in verse itself such as _Rejected Addresses_, which in turn handed on the pattern to the _Bon Gaultier Ballads_ in the middle, and to much else at the end, of the nineteenth century. Part of the style was of course itself but a resharpening of the weapons of the Scriblerus Club; but these weapons were refurbished brightly, and not a little repointed. The newer critic was at least supposed to remember that he was not to be dull. Unfortunately the personal impertinence which, though not pretty even in the verse-satirist, is by a sort of prescription excusable or at least excused in him, transferred itself to the prose: and the political intolerance became even greater.[552] [Sidenote: _Jeffrey._] It is not the least curious freak of the whirligig of time, as shown working in this history, that not a century ago one of the chief places here would have seemed inevitably due to Francis Jeffrey, while at the present moment perhaps a large majority of readers would be disposed to grudge him more than a paragraph, and be somewhat inclined to skip that. [Sidenote: _His loss of place and its cause._]