It was, I believe, in the year 1809 that Mr. John Murray, the great publisher of London--stirred, perhaps, by some incentive talk of Walter Scott, or of other good Tory penmen, and emulous of the success which had attended Jeffrey’s _Review_ in the north, established a rival one--called simply _The Quarterly_--intended to represent the Tory interests as unflinchingly and aggressively as the _Edinburgh_ had done Whig interests. The first editor was a William Gifford[40] (a name worth remembering among those of British critics), who was born in Devonshire. He was the son of a dissolute house-painter, and went to sea in his young days, but was afterwards apprenticed to a shoemaker. Some piquant rhymes he made in those days attracting the attention of benevolent gentlemen, he was put in the way of schooling, and at Oxford, where he studied. It was while there he meditated, and perhaps executed, some of those clever translations from Persius and Juvenal, which he published somewhat later. He edited Ben Jonson’s works in a clumsy and disputatious way, and in some of his earlier, crude, satirical rhymes (_Baviad_) paid his respects to Madame Thrale in this fashion: “See Thrale’s gay widow with a satchel roam, And bring in pomp laborious nothings home.” Again he pounces upon the biographer of Dr. Johnson thus-wise: “Boswell, aping with preposterous pride, Johnson’s worst frailties, rolls from side to side, His heavy head from hour to hour erects, Affects the fool, and is what he affects.” These lines afford a very good measure of his poetic grace and aptitude; but they give only a remote idea of his wonderful capacity for abusing people who did not think as he thought. He had a genius in this direction, which could not have discredited an editorial room in New York--or elsewhere. Walter Scott--a warm political friend--speaks of him as “a little man, dumpled up together, and so ill-made as to seem almost deformed;” and I think that kindly gentleman was disposed to attribute much of the critic’s rancor to his invalidism; but if we measure his printed bile in this way, there must be credited him not only his usual rheumatic twinges, but a pretty constant dyspepsia, if not a chronic neuralgia. Of a certainty he was a most malignant type of British party critics; and it is curious how the savors of its first bitterness do still linger about the pages of the _Quarterly Review_.