of the greatest talent, such as Smollett earlier and Southey just at the last. But, as a rule, they were in the hands of mere hacks; they paid so wretchedly that no one, unless forced by want or bitten by an amateurish desire to see himself in print, would contribute to them; they were by no means beyond suspicion of political and commercial favouritism; and their critiques were very commonly either mere summaries or scrappy "puffs" and "slatings," seldom possessing much grace of style, and scarcely ever adjusted to any scheme of artistic criticism. This is a history of literature, not of the newspaper press, and it is necessary to proceed rather by giving account of the authors who were introduced to the public by--or who, being otherwise known, availed themselves of--this new development of periodicals. It may be sufficient to say here that the landmarks of the period, in point of the birth of papers, are, besides the two above mentioned, the starting of the _Quarterly Review_ as a Tory opponent to the more and more Whiggish _Edinburgh_ in 1809, of the _Examiner_ as a Radical weekly in 1808, of _Blackwood's Magazine_ as a Tory monthly in 1817, of the _London Magazine_ about the same time, and of _Fraser_ in 1830. It was a matter of course that in the direction or on the staff of these new periodicals some of the veterans of the older system, or of the men who had at any rate already some experience in journalism, should be enlisted. Gifford, the first editor of the _Quarterly_, was in all respects a writer of the old rather than of the new age. Southey had at one time wholly, and for years partly, supported himself by writing for periodicals; Coleridge was at different times not merely a contributor to these, but an actual daily journalist; and so with others. But, as always happens when a really new development of literature takes place, new regiments raised themselves to carry out the new tactics, as it were, spontaneously. Many of the great names and the small mentioned in the last three chapters--perhaps indeed most of them--took the periodical shilling at one time or other in their lives. But those whom I shall now proceed to mention--William Cobbett, Francis Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, John Wilson, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt as a prose writer, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, John Gibson Lockhart, and some others--were, if not exactly journalists (an incorrect, but the only single designation), at any rate such frequent contributors to periodical literature of one kind or another that in some cases nothing, in most comparatively little, would be left of their work if contributions to newspapers, reviews, and magazines were to be excluded from it.