be returning with the same warmth of sentiment which he had taken away, it would be very distressing. If a separation of two months should not have cooled him, there were dangers and evils before her; caution for him and for herself would be necessary. She did not mean to have her own affections entangled again, and it would be incumbent on her to avoid any encouragement of his. She wished she might be able to keep him from an absolute declaration. That would be so very painful a conclusion of their present acquaintance; and yet, she could not help rather anticipating something decisive. She felt as if the spring would not pass without bringing a crisis, an event, a something to alter her present composed and tranquil state. It was not very long, though rather longer than Mr. Weston had foreseen, before she had the power of forming some opinion of Frank Churchill's feelings. The Enscombe family were not in town quite so soon as had been imagined, but he was at Highbury very soon afterwards. He rode down for a couple of hours; he could not yet do more; but as he came from Randalls immediately to Hartfield, she could then exercise all her quick observation, and speedily determine how he was influenced, and how she must act. They met with the utmost friendliness. There could be no doubt of his great pleasure in seeing her. But she had an almost instant doubt of his caring for her as he had done, of his feeling the same tenderness in the same degree. She watched him well. It was a clear thing he was less in love than he had been. Absence, with the conviction probably of her indifference, had produced this very natural and very desirable effect. One curious result of the revolution in literary taste was the creation of an official criticism mainly intended to resist the new ideas, and, if possible, to rout them. The foundation of the Edinburgh Review in 1802 is a remarkable landmark in the history of English literature. The proposition that a literary journal should be started which should take the place of the colourless Monthly Review was made by Sydney Smith, but FRANCIS JEFFREY, a young Scotch advocate, was editor from the first, and held the post for six-and-twenty years. He was a half-hearted supporter of the Scoto-Teutonic reformers, but a vehement opponent, first of Coleridge and afterwards of Shelley. It is, however, to be put to his credit that he recognised the genius of both Wordsworth and Keats, in a manner not wholly unsympathetic; his strictures on The Excursion were severe, but there was good sense in them. The finer raptures of poetry, however, were not revealed to Francis, Lord Jeffrey After the Bust by Patrick Park Jeffrey, and in the criticism of their contemporaries he and his staff were often VOL. IV. G The guilty of extraordinary levity. Yet, on the whole, and where the prejudices of the young reviewers were not involved, the Edinburgh did good work, and it created quite a new standard of merit in periodical writing. To counteract its Whiggishness the Ministerial party founded in 1809 the Tory Quarterly Review, and put that bitter pedant and obscurantist, William Gifford, in the editorial chair. This periodical also enjoyed a great success without injuring its rival, which latter, at the close of the period with which we are dealing, had reached the summit of its popularity and a circulation in those days quite quite unparalleled. Readers of the early numbers of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly will to-day be surprised at the emotion they caused and the power they wielded. They are often smart, sometimes witty, rarely sound, and the style is, as a rule, pompous and diffuse. The modern reader is irritated by the haughty assumption of these boyish reviewers, who treat genius as a prisoner at the bar, and as in all probability a guilty prisoner. The Quarterly was in this respect a worse sinner even than the Edinburgh; if Jeffrey worried the authors, Gifford positively bit them. This unjust judging of literature, and particularly of poetry-what is called the 'slashing" style of criticism-when it is now revived, is usually still prosecuted on the lines laid down by Jeffrey and Gifford. It gives satisfaction to the reviewer, pain to the author, and a faint amusement to the public. It has no effect whatever on the ultimate position of the book reviewed, but, exercised on occasion, it is doubtless a useful counter-irritant to thoughtless or venal eulogy. If so, let the credit be given to the venerable Blue-andyellow and Brown Reviews. Sydney Smith After the Portrait by Sir G. Hayter Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey (1773-1850), was son of a depute-clerk in the Supreme Court of Scotland, and was born in Edinburgh on the 23rd of October 1773. He was educated at the High School in Edinburgh and at the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford. When the Edinburgh Review was founded in 1802, Jeffrey was settled in practice in his native city. He was invited to conduct the Review, and he continued to be the editor until 1829, when he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, and resigned the Review into the hands of Macvey Napier (1777-1847). Jeffrey was made Lord Advocate of Scotland in 1830, but the labour of politics-for the post involved attendance in Parliament-was irksome to him. He was still M.P. for Edinburgh, however, when in 1834 he was made a judge of the Court of Session, with the title of Lord Jeffrey. His health began to fail in 1841, but he continued to perform his duties on the bench until a few days before his death, which occurred at Edinburgh on the 26th of January 1850. Jeffrey exercised a sort of dictatorship in English criticism during a period of great importance for our literature, but posterity has reversed the majority of his obiter dicta. He had fine social gifts, and filled a very important position in Edinburgh, when that city was still a centre of hospitality and cultivation. He collected his scattered writings. in four volumes in 1844, but already those who had been astonished at his essays when they appeared anonymously discovered that much of the splendour had departed. Those who turn to his volumes to-day will probably say of them, as Jeffrey himself had the temerity to exclaim of The Excursion, "This will never do!" But he was a man of light and even of leading in his day, and did his honest best to put an extinguisher on the later lights of letters. William Cobbett Engraved by William Ward after a Portrait by J. R. Smith The Rev. Sydney Smith (1771-1845) was the second of the four sons of a gentleman at Woodford, Essex, where he was born on the 3rd of June 1771. His father had been a spendthrift, but he contrived to give his children a sound education, and Sydney went to Winchester and to New College, Oxford. From 1794 to 1797 he was a curate in Wiltshire, and afterwards a tutor in Edinburgh, but he suffered much from poverty, until the production of the Edinburgh Review supplied him with regular literary employment. He moved to London in 1803, and in 1806 he got at last a living, the rectory of Foston-le-Clay, in Yorkshire. At this time he was discharging his clerical duties (at Foston-le-Clay) by deputy, and writing his brilliant Peter Jeremy Bentham After the Portrait by W. Derby Plymley letters (1807-8). Later on he exchanged Foston for the beautiful rectory of Combe Florey, in Somerset, where he loved to entertain his friends. In 1831 he was made a canon residentiary of St. Paul's. In his grand climacteric, 1839, as he said, he became by the death of a relative "unexpectedly a rich man." He died in London on the 22nd of February 1845. Sydney Smith was pre-eminently witty both in writing and in speech, a droll and delightful companion, a perfectly honest man, and a genuine lover of liberty and truth. A book which is little regarded to-day exercised so wide and so beneficial an influence on critical thought at the beginning of the century that it seems imperative to mention it here. The Curiosities Minor Prose of Literature, by Isaac D'Israeli, was not a masterpiece, but its storehouses of anecdote and cultivated reflection must have familiarised with the out Writers lines of literary history thousands who William Cobbett (1762-1835) was born Isaac Disraeli After the Portrait by Denning author of The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1812-21), and of a style did injustice to his learning and to the Ruins of Kenilworth Castle During the later years of this period romantic fiction fell into great Scott's Novels decay. Out of its ashes sprang the historical novel, the invention of which was boldly claimed by Miss Jane Porter (1776-1850), whose Thaddeus of Warsaw, 1803, long cherished by our great-grandfathers, and not entirely unknown to our fathers, had some faint merit. Other ladies, with the courage of their sex, but with remarkably little knowledge of the subject, attacked the muse of history. But nothing was really done of importance until Sir WALTER SCOTT turned his attention from poetry to prose romance. Waverley was not published till 1814, and the long series of novels really belong to the subsequent chapter. They had, however, long been prepared for, and it will be convenient to consider them here. Scott had written a fragment |