success of the Review was secure; but, for some years after its commencement it had been an uphill fight. The first number was disappointing. Hardly sufficient time had been allowed for its preparation; and it contained nothing calculated to attract or startle the public mind. Still, it is not the first number of a new Review that matters; it is the second or third. But the second and third, in this case, were not very different from the first; and the second, moreover, was six weeks late. So was the third; so indeed were almost all the numbers edited by Gifford. Murray was almost in despair. 'We are going on very indifferently,' he wrote. But he bestirred himself actively to obtain the services of good writers, and in other ways to push the Review. In fact he seems, even at this date, to have done a large part of the editor's work; not indeed in revising the articles, for in this he never interfered, but in determining the subjects, enlisting authors, etc. Success came slowly. Ellis told Gifford plainly that the third number was 'most notoriously and unequivocally dull.' The fourth, however, showed distinct improvement. One of its articles, on Charles Fox, by Robert Grant, was the first, according to Murray, to attract general attention. What seems now most remarkable in this paper is that the new Tory organ surveys the character of the great Whig leader with impartiality and even friendliness.

'As, on the one hand' (says the writer), 'Mr Pitt's whole life shows that, although the chosen champion of the monarchy, he was not the less zealous, both from principle and from sentiment, in upholding the just rights of parliament and of the people; so it must be admitted, on the other hand, by every impartial man, that the whole tenour of Mr Fox's conduct, while in the government . . . afforded a fair presumption that the honour and interests of the Crown would not have been unsafe in his hands.'

...

In 1812 Murray had transferred his business from Fleet Street to the historic house, 50 Albemarle Street, which has been its home ever since that day. The move to a quarter within easy reach of the clubs, the courts, the Houses of Parliament, and the dwelling-places of most public men, was beneficial not only to the publishing business in general, but in particular to the Quarterly

Review. Murray's drawing-room, especially in the days before the Athenæum was founded, and for some time afterwards, was the haunt of many men distinguished in politics and letters. There Scott and Byron first made acquaintance. There George Ticknor, fresh from Boston, met on one occasion Moore, Campbell, D'Israeli, Theodore Hook, Gifford, Humphry Davy, Hallam, and others. Canning, Frere, Mackintosh, besides the regular writers in the Review, are enumerated by Murray himself among his habitual visitors. Mrs Bray, the novelist, relates in 1819 that Mr Murray held daily, from about three to five o'clock, a literary levée at his house.' 'Murray's drawing-room (says Washington Irving) is a great resort of first-rate literary characters.' The literary circle which Murray succeeded in collecting round him supplied many contributors to the Review and spread abroad its fame.

Meanwhile, however, the arrears of publication grew worse than ever; the number due in October 1815 was published in March 1816, that due in January 1816 in the following May. Numbers 57-59 (1823) were four, five, and six months late respectively. But an irregularity which would destroy any Review in the present day was tolerated when there was practically no competition, except from the Edinburgh'; and the excellence of the matter made some amends. The circulation rapidly improved. In 1815 it reached 9000; next year it jumped to 12,000; in 1819 it attained 14,000, at a time when, according to Prof. Wilson, the Edinburgh' had sunk to half that figure.

6

*

Gifford, as editor, took a serious view of the responsibilities of his position, and held a high opinion of his rights. He wrote little himself;† on the other hand, he bestowed on the productions of his contributors a minute and laborious attention which, naturally enough, was by no means always to their taste. It is clear from his correspondence that he dealt in a high-handed way with the work submitted to him, and not only with the work of inferior authors, but with that of such accomplished

* In Blackwood's Magazine'; see 'Memoir of John Murray,' i, 495. + Smiles (Memoir,' i, 200) says that Gifford wrote only one entire article,' that on Ford's Dramatic Works' (No. 12); but he is credited in the register with some eight or nine, and he appears to have been joint author of at least as many more.

writers as Southey, Croker, and Barrow. Reference has already been made to Southey's complaints; but in general it appears to have been recognised that Gifford's operations, if sometimes annoying, conduced largely to the success of the Review. Writing to Blackwood in 1818, Murray says: 'One great advantage of the editor [Gifford] is that he does not write; but what he does do is equal in value to writing half the number.'

One of the most remarkable characteristics of the Review during Gifford's editorship is the paucity of articles on foreign politics and (during the first six years) on the war. It is hardly credible that the Peninsular War should have escaped notice after 1809. There is nothing on the Austrian campaign of that year, nothing on the war with America (1812-14), nothing on the battle of Leipzig and its consequences, nothing on the first or second Peace of Paris or the Congress of Vienna. Even the battle of Waterloo passes unnoticed, except incidentally; and the death of Napoleon stirs no contributor to a review of his marvellous career. No doubt the fact that all articles at this time were, ostensibly at least, reviews of books or papers, accounts for some strange omissions. But it would seem that the long struggle with France ended by boring the public. They took it as a disagreeable necessity, but as something not to be talked about.

Gifford's health, always unsatisfactory, seems to have grown worse about 1816. Always persecuted by asthma, he now began to suffer from jaundice and other ailments. Time after time he was on the point of resigning his editorial duties, which, indeed, he could not have discharged without the help of Croker, Barrow, and especi ally Murray; but he gallantly struggled on for eight years more. In 1823 a crisis was evidently approaching Gifford became so ill that he actually allowed an article of Southey's to pass without mutilation.' In 1824 only two numbers of the Review appeared. In September of that year the editor resigned. Two years later, on the last day of 1826, he died.

'Gifford' (says Smiles) has earned, but it is now generally recognised that he has unjustly earned, the character of a

* It is discussed, of course, in Southey's two articles on Wellington; but these did not appear till 1815.