The establishment of the _Edinburgh Review_, as all the world knows, was the beginning of a new era in the history of British politics. For a while, indeed, it was rather as a power in the general thought and literature of the country than as a direct force in politics that the new organ made itself felt. For its success in the latter function circumstances for the first two or three years were not very propitious. The war with France having been renewed in 1803, and the Addington ministry having resigned in May 1804, and Pitt having then resumed the Premiership with Dundas (now Lord Melville) as again his principal colleague and at the head of the Admiralty, not only were the Scottish Tories once more in a mood of placid satisfaction over this change, and over the prospect which it brought of a reassured term of the Dundas proconsulship in Scotland; but the very occasion of the recall of Pitt to power, the very nature of the business in which Pitt and Dundas had to exert themselves, tended for the time to a modification, or at least a postponement, of party differences. Napoleon was now Emperor of the French; what he threatened now was an actual invasion of Britain; how could party differences continue operative in any virulent degree in face of such a common danger? Party differences did subside for the while. All over the island Whigs and Tories alike were in a ferment of volunteering and drilling for resistance to the French when they should land; and was it not a Whig admiral that, having won for all Britain the glory, willingly bequeathed to a Tory Government the usufruct, of the great battle of Trafalgar? People were at no leisure to listen with sufficient attention at such a time to expositions of the superiority of Whig principles, even from such an organ as the _Edinburgh Review_.