One day early in 1802, ‘in the eighth or ninth story or flat in Buccleugh Place, the elevated residence of the then Mr. Jeffrey,’ Mr. Jeffrey had received a visit from Horner and Sydney Smith, when Sydney, at this time a young English curate temporarily resident in Edinburgh, preaching, teaching, and joking with a flow of wit, humanity, and sense that fascinated everybody, started the notion of the Edinburgh Review. The two Scotchmen at once voted the Englishman its editor, and the notion was communicated to John Archibald Murray (Lord Advocate after Jeffrey, long years afterward), John Allen (then lecturing on medical subjects at the University, but who went abroad before he could render any essential service), and Alexander Hamilton (afterwards Sanscrit professor at Haileybury). This was the first council; but it was extended, after a few days, till the two Thomsons (John and Thomas, the physician and the advocate), Thomas Brown (who succeeded to Dugald Stewart’s chair), and Henry Brougham, were admitted to the deliberations. Horner’s quondam playfellow was an ally too potent to be obtained without trouble; and, even thus early, had not a few characteristics in common with the Roman statesman and orator whom it was his greatest ambition in after life to resemble, and of whom Shakspeare has told us that he never followed anything that other men began. ‘You remember how cheerfully Brougham approved of our plan at first,’ wrote Jeffrey to Horner, in April, in the thick of anxious preparations for the start, ‘and agreed to give us an article or two without hesitation. Three or four days ago I proposed two or three books that I thought would suit him; when he answered, with perfect good humour, that he had changed his view of our plan a little, and rather thought now that he should decline to have any connection with it.’ This little coquetry was nevertheless overcome; and before the next six months were over, Brougham had become an efficient and zealous member of the band. It is curious to see how the project hung fire at first. Jeffrey had nearly finished four articles, Horner had partly written four, and more than half the number was printed; and yet well nigh the other half had still to be written. The memorable fasciculus at last appeared in November, after a somewhat tedious gestation of nearly ten months; having been subject to what Jeffrey calls so ‘miserable a state of backwardness’ and so many ‘symptoms of despondency,’ that Constable had to delay the publication some weeks beyond the day first fixed. Yet as early as April had Sydney Smith completed more than half of what he contributed, while nobody else had put pen to paper; and shortly after the number appeared he was probably not sorry to be summoned, with his easy pen and his cheerful wit, to London, and to abandon the cares of editorship to Jeffrey.