Since the time when Jeffrey ruled the _Edinburgh Review_, and even since the death of Mr. Napier, "the advertising element," and commercial elements in general, have played a great and new part, an increasing part, too, in the fortunes, and thus in regulating the quality and tendency, of current literature. One result of this state of things is an ever-increasing tendency to compromise in the expression of opinion. In spite of the spirit of tolerance of which we hear so much, there was perhaps never a time in which the expression of opinion was so much emasculated in the higher periodical literature, or in which so much trickery of accommodated phraseology was going forward. This will last for a long time yet--as long as periodical literature is a matter of commercial speculation. It is an evil omen that the greatest amount of freedom now displayed is in political and scientific discussion. It is difficult to see where the remedy is to come from in discussions of another kind. Probably we shall have a lesson by the cataclysmic method before very long. There is in this volume a letter from Brougham to Napier, in which Brougham is very angry about an indirect disclosure of Romilly's heterodoxy, and he goes off at a tangent to express a doubt whether Macaulay was any better than Romilly, but is very anxious that conventional conformity should be strictly maintained in the Review, even to the length of concealing from the general reader as far as possible such facts as that a man so good and "religious" as Romilly could be a disbeliever in this, that, or the other. We have now got beyond that; the accredited policy is in a vague way to trump the cards of the dangerous people, and then nobody shows his hand fairly and freely. Meanwhile, everybody feels uneasy, from a latent sense of insincerity; and, when once the excitement is off, the natural perception that out of nothing nothing can come, reassumes its sway. The game cannot go on in this way for ever, though no one can foresee by what accident the lights will be blown out, the tables thrown over, and the stakes roughly dealt with at last.