Perhaps there is no single feature of the English literary history of the nineteenth century, not even the enormous popularisation and multiplication of the novel, which is so distinctive and characteristic as the development in it of periodical literature. For this did not, as the extension of novel writing did, concern a single department only. The periodical--it may almost for shortness' sake be said the newspaper--not only became infinitely multiplied, but it gradually absorbed almost every department, or a share of almost every department, into itself. Very large numbers of the best as well as of the worst novels themselves have originally appeared in periodicals; not a very small proportion of the most noteworthy nineteenth century poetry has had the same origin; it may almost be said that all the best work in essay, whether critical, meditative, or miscellaneous, has thus been ushered into the world. Even the severer and more academic divisions of history, philosophy, theology, and their sisters, have condescended to avail themselves of this means of obtaining a public audience; and though there is still a certain conventional decency in apologising for reprints from periodicals, it is quite certain that, had such reprints not taken place, more than half the most valuable books of the age in some departments, and a considerable minority of the most valuable in others, would never have appeared as books at all. The first division of our time, the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, though it witnessed a very great development of the mere newspaper, with which we have little to do, did not see very much of this actual "development of periodical literature" which concerns us. These twenty years saw the last attempts in the line of the Addisonian essay; they saw the beginnings of some modern newspapers which exist at the present day; they beheld in the _Anti-Jacobin_ perhaps the most brilliant specimen of political persiflage in newspaper form that had or has ever been seen. But they did not see--though they saw some fumbling attempts at it--anything like those strangely different but mutually complementary examples of periodical criticism which were given just after the opening of the new age by _The Edinburgh Review_ (1802) and Cobbett's _Weekly Register_; and they saw nothing at all like the magazine, or combination of critical and creative matter, in which _Blackwood_ was, some years later, to lead the way. At the close of the eighteenth century such magazines were in an exceedingly rudimentary state, and criticism was mainly still in the hands of the old _Monthly_ and _Critical Reviews_, the respective methods of which had drawn from Johnson the odd remark that the _Critical_ men, being clever, said little about their books, which the _Monthly_ men, being "duller fellows," were glad to read and analyse. These Reviews and their various contemporaries had indeed from time to time enjoyed the services of men