however able. The point, however, is that it never dawns upon the mind of even so clever and cultivated a man as Mr. Senior, that his head may have gaps in it. Another instance to the same purport may be selected from a letter from Mr. Edwin Atherstone, the poet--for it would perhaps be hard and grudging to deny him the title, since he found an audience, and I have a vague recollection of having once read verses of his about Nineveh or Babylon which had in them power of the picturesque-meditative order. Now, this is the way in which Mr. Edwin Atherstone speaks of Dr. Thomas Brown, the metaphysician:--"For myself, I know not a writer, with the exception of Shakspeare, Milton, Homer, and Scott, from whom I have derived such high delight as from Dr. Brown." Was ever such a category put on paper before? It is as if a man should say his favourite musical instruments were the organ, the harp, the trumpet, the violin, and the sewing-machine. Brown was one of the most readable of metaphysicians; he made some acute hits, and he wrote elegant verses; but his position in Mr. Atherstone's list is as inexplicably quaint as that of "Burke, commonly called the Sublime," in the epitaph on the lady who "painted in water-colours," and "was first cousin to Lady Jones." The worst examples of all, however, come from the letters of Francis Jeffrey himself. Jeffrey has been underrated, and he was a most amiable man; but some of the verdicts he thought fit to pronounce upon articles in the _Edinburgh_, when edited by Mr. Napier, are _saugrenus_. In one case he is about suggesting a contributor, to deal with a certain topic, and is so polite as to say that the name of Mr. John Stuart Mill had struck him:--"I once thought of John Mill, but there are reasons against him too, independent of his great unreadable book and its elaborate demonstrations of axioms and truisms." There might be weighty "reasons against" Mr. Mill, but what his "Logic" could have to do with the question is not clear. It never seems to have crossed Jeffrey's mind that he _might_ be totally disqualified for forming an opinion of a book like that; and, having called it "unreadable" (though to a reader with any natural bent towards such matters it is deeply interesting), he actually puts forward the fact that Mill had written it as a reason against his being entrusted with the treatment of a political topic in a Whig Review. Editors are human, and the editorial position is a very troublesome one. An editor may lose his head, as an overworked wine-taster may lose his palate. In a word, allowances must be made; but, after a disclosure or two like this, it is difficult not to conclude that the Review owed no more of its success to its former editor than it might have owed to any intelligent clerk. But we cannot let Jeffrey go yet. The following passage relates to an article on Victor Cousin:--