I read recently a review of an historical romancea last faltering descendant of the racewhose author in an endeavor to restore the past, had made too free a use of obsolete words.

I can fancy that a writer after spending a morning in the composition of a political article on the whisper of a Cabinet Minister, wrote a sonnet after lunch, and a book review before dinner.

" In 1802, when the Edinburgh Review (which was the first of its line to acquire distinction) came into being, the passion of the times found voice in politics.

Billingsgate that had grown along the wharves of the lower river, was found to be of service in Parliament and gave a spice and sparkle even to a book review.

It is not enough to say that Francis Jeffrey was a reviewer, he was as well a Whig and was running a Review that was Whig from the front cover to the back.

William Gifford was more than merely the editor of the Quarterly Review, for he was as well a Tory editor whose duty it was to pry into Whiggish roguery.

The Edinburgh Review was founded in 1802, the Quarterly Review in 1809, Blackwood's Magazine in 1817.

The Edinburgh Review was founded in 1802, the Quarterly Review in 1809, Blackwood's Magazine in 1817.

The founding of the Review was casual.

From so slight a root the Review sprouted.

The Review became immediately a power, appearing quarterly and striking its blows anonymously against a sluggish government, lashing the Tory writers, and taking its part, which is of greater consequence, in the promulgation of the Whig reforms which were to ripen in thirty years and convert the old into modern England.

The Quarterly Review was the next to come and it was Tory.

John Murray, the London publisher, had been the English distributor of the Edinburgh Review.

In 1809, two considerations moved him to found in London a review to rival the Scotch periodical.

First the Tory party was being hard hit by the Edinburgh Review and there was need of defense and retaliation.

The rise of the Quarterly Review was not brilliant.

It was eight years before another enduring review was started.

He had launched a review the year previously, in 1816, but it had foundered when it was scarcely off the ways.

The Edinburgh Review, the most able of the three and the most in earnest in politics, is the least vituperative.

In the judgment of the Edinburgh Review, Tom Moore, who had just published his "Odes and Epistles" but had not yet begun his Irish melodies, is a man who "with some brilliancy of fancy, and some show of classical erudition ... may boast, if the boast can please him, of being the most licentious of modern versifiers, and the most poetical of those who, in our times, have devoted their talents to the propagation of immorality.

" As long as Jeffrey hoped to enlist Southey to write for the Edinburgh Review, he treated him with some favor.

" Now for the Quarterly Review, if by chance it can show an equal spleen!

There are twenty-six pages of this in one review only, and any paragraph would be worth the quoting for its ferocity.

In a later review, Hunt is a propounder of atheism.

The band played some martial music, and the cavalry passed very handsomely in review before General Sheridan.