The Speculative Society dealt with the usual subjects of elocution and debate prevalent in similar places then and since; such as, whether there ought to be an Established Religion, and whether the Execution of Charles I. was justifiable, and if Ossian's poems were authentic? It was not a fraternity of speculators by any means of an alarming or dangerous sort. John Allen and his friends, at this very time, were spouting forth active sympathy for French Republicanism at Fortune's Tavern under immediate and watchful superintendence of the Police; James Mackintosh was parading the streets with Horne Tooke's colors in his hat; James Montgomery was expiating in York jail his exulting ballad on the fall of the Bastile; and Southey and Coleridge, in despair of old England, had completed the arrangements of their youthful colony for a community of property, and proscription of every thing selfish, on the banks of the Susquehanna; but the speculative orators rarely probed the sores of the body politic deeper than an inquiry into the practical advantages of belief in a future state? and whether it was for the interest of Britain to maintain the balance of Europe? or if knowledge could be too much disseminated among the lower ranks of the people? In short, nothing of the extravagance of the time, on either side, is associable with the outset of Jeffrey's career. As little does he seem to have been influenced, on the one hand, by the democratic foray of some two hundred convention delegates into Edinburgh in 1792, as, on the other, by the prominence of his father's name to a protest of frantic high-tory defiance; and he was justified, not many years since, in referring with pride to the fact that, at the opening of his public life, his view of the character of the first French revolution, and of its probable influence on other countries, had been such as to require little modification during the whole of his subsequent career. The precision and accuracy of his judgment had begun to show itself thus early. At the crude young Jacobins, so soon to ripen into Quarterly Reviewers, who were just now coquetting with Mary Woolstonecraft, or making love to the ghost of Madame Roland, or branding as worthy of the bowstring the tyrannical enormities of Mr. Pitt, he could afford to laugh from the first. From the very first he had the strongest liberal tendencies, but restrained them so wisely that he could cultivate them well.