An important addition to the ranks was the _Monthly Magazine_ begun in 1796 by Sir Richard Phillips under the editorship of John Aikin. The principal contributor was William Taylor of Norwich who, during a period of thirty years, supplied to the _Monthly Magazine_ and other periodicals a series of 1,750 articles of remarkable quality. His contributions gave the Magazine standing as a literary review. Hazlitt accorded to Taylor the honor of writing the first reviews in the style afterwards adopted by the Edinburgh Reviewers, which established their reputations as original and impartial critics. He is remembered to-day as the author of an unread _Historic Survey of German Poetry_ which was vigorously assailed by Carlyle in the _Edinburgh Review_. The _New Monthly Magazine_ was started in 1814 by Henry Colburn and Frederick Shoberl in opposition to Phillips' magazine. Its first editors were Dr. Watkins and Alaric A. Watts. At a later time Campbell, Bulwer, Theodore Hook and Harrison Ainsworth successively assumed charge. Under such capable direction the magazine naturally won a prominent place among the periodicals of the day. During its later years the _New Monthly_ was obscured by more ambitious ventures and came to an inglorious end in 1875--thirty-two years after the suspension of Phillips' _Monthly Magazine_. A most significant event in the history of the magazine was the founding of the _Edinburgh Monthly Magazine_ in April, 1817, by William Blackwood. The new magazine was projected to counteract the influence of the _Edinburgh Review_, but under its first editors, James Cleghorn and Thomas Pringle, it failed to win favor. After six numbers were issued, a final disagreement between Blackwood and the editors resulted in the withdrawal of the latter. The name of the monthly was changed to _Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_--popularly _Blackwood's_ or "Maga"--and henceforth until his death Blackwood was his own editor. John Wilson (Christopher North) and John Gibson Lockhart, the most important of the early contributors to _Blackwood's_, published in that famous seventh number the clever _Chaldee Manuscript_--an audacious satire upon the original editors, the rival publisher Constable, the _Edinburgh Review_ and various literary personages under a thinly veiled allegory in apocalyptic style. It at once attracted wide attention (including a costly action for libel within a fortnight) and was suppressed in the second impression of the number. The same number of _Blackwood's_ set the precedent for the subsequent critical vituperation that made the magazine notorious. It contained an abusive article on Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_ and the first of a series of virulent attacks on "The Cockney School of Poetry." Much of the literary criticism in the first few volumes is inexcusably brutal; fortunately, _Blackwood's_ soon became less rampant in its critical outbursts. The coöperation of James