We opened our budget in the last chapter with the _Quarterly Review_, which was just getting upon its legs through the smart, keen, and hard writing of Mr. William Gifford. It throve afterward under the coddling of the most literary of the Tory gentlemen in London, and its title has always been associated with the names of John Wilson Croker, of Dr. Southey, and of Mr. Lockhart. It is a journal, too, which has always been tied by golden bonds to the worship of tradition and of vested privilege, and which has always been ready with its petulant, impatient bark of detraction at reform or reformers, or at any books which may have had a scent of Liberalism. Leigh Hunt, of course, came in for periodic scathings--some of them deserved; some not deserved. Indeed, I am half-disposed to repent what may have seemed a too flippant mention of this very graceful poet and essayist. Of a surety, there is an abounding affluence of easy language--gushing and disporting over his pages--which lures one into reading and into dreamy acquiescence; but read as much as we may, and as long as we will, we shall go away from the reading with a certain annoyance that there is so little to keep out of it all--so little that sticks to the ribs and helps. As for the poet Moore, of whom also we may have spoken in terms which may seem of too great disparagement to those who have loved to linger in his “Vale of Cashmere With its roses, the brightest that earth ever gave. Its temples, and grottos, and fountains as clear As the love-lighted eyes that hang over their wave,” no matter what may become of these brilliant orientalisms, or of his life of Byron, or of his diaries, and his “Two-penny Post Bag,” it is certain that his name will be gratefully kept alive by his sparkling, patriotic, and most musical Irish melodies; and under that sufficient monument we leave him. As for Landor--surely the pages in which we dealt with him were not too long: a strange, strong bit of manhood--as of one fed on collops of bear’s meat; a big animal nature, yet wonderfully transfused by a vivid intellectuality--fine and high--that pierced weighty subjects to their core; and yet--and yet, singing such heart-shivering tributes as that to Rose Aylmer: coarse as the bumpkins on the sheep wolds of Lincoln, and yet with as fine subtleties in him as belonged to the young Greeks who clustered about the writer of the _Œdipus Tyrannus_. _The “First Gentleman.”_