We have hinted already that the responsibility for this group of
ill-mannered recriminations may probably be distributed between Gifford,
Croker, and Lockhart. It is curious to notice that the second attack on
Scott appeared after his admission to the ranks of contributors; and the
author of _Waverley_ is perhaps the one man said to have friends both on
the _Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly_. That on Leigh Hunt, always the pet
topic of Toryism, from whom he certainly provoked some retaliation, is
only paralleled in _Blackwood_. We have included the _Shakespeare_ and
the _Moxon_ as attractively brief samples on the approved model of
savage banter, and the _Jane Eyre_ as perhaps the most flagrant example
of bad taste to be found in these merciless pages. It was George Henry
Lewis, by the way, who so much offended Charlotte Brontë by the
greeting, "There ought to be a bond between us, for we have both written
naughty books."
It is interesting to find Thackeray among those it was permitted to
praise: though the "moral" objection to his "realism" reveals a strange
attitude.
We may notice, with some surprise, that the attitude towards George
Eliot is nearly as hostile as towards Charlotte Brontë.