debate prevalent in similar places then and since; such as, whether
there ought to be an Established Religion, and whether the Execution
of Charles I. was justifiable, and if Ossian’s poems were authentic?
It was not a fraternity of speculators by any means of an alarming or
dangerous sort. John Allen and his friends, at this very time, were
spouting forth active sympathy for French Republicanism at Fortune’s
Tavern, under immediate and watchful superintendence of the Police;
James Macintosh was parading the streets with Horne Tooke’s colours in
his hat; James Montgomery was expiating in York Jail his exulting
ballad on the Fall of the Bastille; and Southey and Coleridge, in
despair of old England, had completed the arrangements of their
youthful colony for a community of property, and proscription of
everything selfish, on the banks of the Susquehana;—but the
Speculative orators rarely probed the sores of the body politic deeper
than an inquiry into the practical advantages of belief in a future
state? and whether it was for the interest of Britain to maintain the
balance of Europe? or if knowledge could be too much disseminated
among the lower ranks of the people?
In short, nothing of the extravagance of the time, on either side, is
associable with the outset of Jeffrey’s career. As little does he seem
to have been influenced, on the one hand, by the democratic foray of
some two hundred convention delegates into Edinburgh in 1792, as, on
the other, by the prominence of his father’s name to a protest of
frantic high-tory defiance; and he was justified not many years since
in referring with pride to the fact that, at the opening of his public
life, his view of the character of the first French revolution, and of
its probable influence on other countries, had been such as to require
little modification during the whole of his subsequent career. The
precision and accuracy of his judgment had begun to show itself thus
early. At the crude young Jacobins, so soon to ripen into Quarterly
Reviewers, who were just now coquetting with Mary Woolstonecraft, or
making love to the ghost of Madame Roland, or branding as worthy of
the bowstring the tyrannical enormities of Mr. Pitt, he could afford
to laugh from the first. From the very first he had the strongest
liberal tendencies, but restrained them so wisely that he could
cultivate them well.
He joined the band of youths who then sat at the feet of Dugald
Stewart, and whose first incentive to distinction in the more
difficult paths of knowledge, as well as their almost universal
adoption of the liberal school of politics, are in some degree
attributable to the teaching of that distinguished man. Among them
were Brougham and Horner, who had played together from boyhood in
Edinburgh streets, had joined the Speculative on the same evening six
years after Jeffrey (who in Brougham soon found a sharp opponent on
colonial and other matters), and were still fast friends. Jeffrey’s
father, raised to a deputy clerk of session, now lived on a third or
fourth flat in Buchanan’s Court in the Lawn Market, where the worthy
old gentleman kept two women servants and a man at livery; but where
the furniture does not seem to have been of the soundest. This fact
his son used to illustrate by an anecdote of the old gentleman eagerly
setting-to at a favourite dinner one day, with the two corners of the
table cloth tied round his neck to protect his immense professional
frills, when the leg of his chair gave way, and he tumbled back on the
floor with all the dishes, sauces, and viands a-top of him. Father and
son lived here together, till the latter took for his first wife the
daughter of the Professor of Hebrew in the University of St. Andrew,
and moved to an upper story in another part of town. He had been
called to the bar in 1794, and was married eight years afterward. He
had not meanwhile obtained much practice, and the elevation implied in
removal to an upper flat is not of the kind that a young Benedict
covets. But distinction of another kind was at length at hand.
One day early in 1802, ‘in the eighth or ninth story or flat in
Buccleugh Place, the elevated residence of the then Mr. Jeffrey,’ Mr.
Jeffrey had received a visit from Horner and Sydney Smith, when
Sydney, at this time a young English curate temporarily resident in
Edinburgh, preaching, teaching, and joking with a flow of wit,
humanity, and sense that fascinated everybody, started the notion of
the Edinburgh Review. The two Scotchmen at once voted the Englishman
its editor, and the notion was communicated to John Archibald Murray
(Lord Advocate after Jeffrey, long years afterward), John Allen (then
lecturing on medical subjects at the University, but who went abroad
before he could render any essential service), and Alexander Hamilton
(afterwards Sanscrit professor at Haileybury). This was the first
council; but it was extended, after a few days, till the two Thomsons
(John and Thomas, the physician and the advocate), Thomas Brown (who
succeeded to Dugald Stewart’s chair), and Henry Brougham, were
admitted to the deliberations. Horner’s quondam playfellow was an ally
too potent to be obtained without trouble; and, even thus early, had
not a few characteristics in common with the Roman statesman and
orator whom it was his greatest ambition in after life to resemble,
and of whom Shakspeare has told us that he never followed anything
that other men began.
‘You remember how cheerfully Brougham approved of our plan at first,’
wrote Jeffrey to Horner, in April, in the thick of anxious
preparations for the start, ‘and agreed to give us an article or two
without hesitation. Three or four days ago I proposed two or three
books that I thought would suit him; when he answered, with perfect
good humour, that he had changed his view of our plan a little, and
rather thought now that he should decline to have any connection with
it.’ This little coquetry was nevertheless overcome; and before the
next six months were over, Brougham had become an efficient and
zealous member of the band.
It is curious to see how the project hung fire at first. Jeffrey had
nearly finished four articles, Horner had partly written four, and
more than half the number was printed; and yet well nigh the other
half had still to be written. The memorable fasciculus at last
appeared in November, after a somewhat tedious gestation of nearly ten
months; having been subject to what Jeffrey calls so ‘miserable a
state of backwardness’ and so many ‘symptoms of despondency,’ that
Constable had to delay the publication some weeks beyond the day first
fixed. Yet as early as April had Sydney Smith completed more than half
of what he contributed, while nobody else had put pen to paper; and
shortly after the number appeared he was probably not sorry to be
summoned, with his easy pen and his cheerful wit, to London, and to
abandon the cares of editorship to Jeffrey.
No other choice could have been made. That first number settled the
point. It is easy to discover that Jeffrey’s estimation in Edinburgh
had not, up to this time, been in any just proportion to his powers;
and that, even with those who knew him best, his playful and sportive
fancy sparkled too much to the surface of his talk to let them see the
grave deep currents that ran underneath. Every one now read with
surprise the articles attributed to him. Sydney had yielded him the
place of honour, and he had vindicated his right to it. He had thrown
out a new and forcible style of criticism, with a fearless,
unmisgiving, and unhesitating courage. Objectors might doubt or cavil
at the opinions expressed; but the various and comprehensive
knowledge, the subtle argumentative genius, the brilliant and definite
expression, there was no disputing or denying. A fresh and startling
power was about to make itself felt in literature.
‘Jeffrey,’ said his most generous fellow labourer, a few days after
the Review appeared, ‘is the person who will derive most honour from
this publication, as his articles in this number are generally known,
and are incomparably the best; I have received the greater pleasure
from this circumstance, because the genius of that little man has
remained almost unknown to all but his most intimate acquaintances.
His manner is not at first pleasing; what is worse, it is of that cast
which almost irresistibly impresses upon strangers the idea of levity
and superficial talents. Yet there is not any man, whose real
character is so much the reverse; he has, indeed, a very sportive and
playful fancy, but it is accompanied with an extensive and varied
information, with a readiness of apprehension almost intuitive, with
judicious and calm discernment, with a profound and penetrating
understanding.’ This confident passage from a private journal of the
20th November, 1802, may stand as a remarkable monument of the
prescience of Francis Horner.
Yet it was also the opinion of this candid and sagacious man that he
and his fellows had not gained much character by that first number of
the Review. As a set-off to the talents exhibited, he spoke of the
severity—of what, in some of the papers, might be called the
scurrility—as having given general dissatisfaction; and he predicted
that they would have to soften their tone, and be more indulgent to
folly and bad taste. Perhaps it is hardly thus that the objection
should have been expressed. It is now, after the lapse of nearly half
a century, admitted on all hands that the tone adopted by these young
Edinburgh reviewers was in some respects extremely indiscreet; and
that it was not simply folly and bad taste, but originality and
genius, that had the right to more indulgence at their hands. When
Lord Jeffrey lately collected Mr. Jeffrey’s critical articles, he
silently dropped those very specimens of his power which by their
boldness of view, severity of remark, and vivacity of expression,
would still as of old have attracted the greatest notice; and
preferred to connect with his name, in the regard of such as might
hereafter take interest in his writings, only those papers which, by
enforcing what appeared to him just principles and useful opinions, he
hoped might have a tendency to make men happier and better. Somebody
said by way of compliment of the early days of the Scotch Review, that
it made reviewing more respectable than authorship; and the remark,
though essentially the reverse of a compliment, exhibits with
tolerable accuracy the general design of the work at its outset. Its
ardent young reviewers took a somewhat too ambitious stand above the
literature they criticised. ‘To all of us,’ Horner ingenuously
confessed, ‘it is only matter of temporary amusement and subordinate
occupation.’
Something of the same notion was in Scott’s thoughts when, smarting
from a severe but not unjust or ungenerous review of Marmion, he said
that Jeffrey loved to see imagination best when it is bitted and
managed, and ridden upon the _grand pas_. He did not make sufficient
allowance for starts and sallies and bounds, when Pegasus was
beautiful to behold, though sometimes perilous to his rider. He would
have had control of horse as well as rider, Scott complained, and made
himself master of the ménage to both. But on the other hand this was
often very possible; and nothing could then be conceived more charming
than the earnest, playful, delightful way in which his comments
adorned and enriched the poets he admired. Hogarth is not happier in
Charles Lamb’s company, than is the homely vigour and genius of Crabbe
under Jeffrey’s friendly leading; he returned fancy for fancy to
Moore’s exuberance, and sparkled with a wit as keen; he ‘tamed his
wild heart’ to the loving thoughtfulness of Rogers, his scholarly
enthusiasm, his pure and vivid pictures; with the fiery energy and
passionate exuberance of Byron, his bright courageous spirit broke
into earnest sympathy; for the clear and stirring strains of Campbell
he had an ever lively and liberal response; and Scott, in the midst of
many temptations to the exercise of severity, never ceased to awaken
the romance and generosity of his nature.
His own idea of the more grave critical claims put forth by him in his
early days, found expression in later life. He had constantly
endeavoured, he said, to combine ethical precepts with literary
criticism. He had earnestly sought to impress his readers with a
sense, both of the close connection between sound intellectual
attainments, and the higher elements of duty and enjoyment; and of the
just and ultimate subordination of the former to the latter. Nor
without good reason did he take this praise to himself. The taste
which Dugald Stewart had implanted in him, governed him more than any
other at the outset of his career; and may often have contributed not
a little, though quite unconsciously, to lift the aspiring young
metaphysician somewhat too ambitiously above the level of the luckless
author summoned to his judgment seat. Before the third year of the
review had opened, he had broken a spear in the lists of metaphysical
philosophy even with his old tutor, and with Jeremy Bentham, both in
the maturity of their fame; he had assailed, with equal gallantry, the
opposite errors of Priestley and Reid; and, not many years later, he
invited his friend Alison to a friendly contest, from which the
fancies of that amiable man came out dulled by a superior brightness,
by more lively, varied, and animated conceptions of beauty, and by a
style which recommended a more than Scotch soberness of doctrine with
a more than French vivacity of expression.
For it is to be said of Jeffrey, that when he opposed himself to
enthusiasm, he did so in the spirit of an enthusiast; and that this
had a tendency to correct such critical mistakes as he may
occasionally have committed. And as of him, so of his Review. In
professing to go deeply into the _principles_ on which its judgments
were to be rested, as well as to take large and original views of all
the important questions to which those works might relate,—it
substantially succeeded, as Jeffrey presumed to think it had done, in
familiarising the public mind with higher speculations, and sounder
and larger views of the great objects of human pursuit; as well as in
permanently raising the standard, and increasing the influence, of all
such occasional writings far beyond the limits of Great Britain.
Nor let it be forgotten that the system on which Jeffrey established
relations between his writers and publishers has been of the highest
value as a precedent in such matters, and has protected the
independence and dignity of a later race of reviewers. He would never
receive an unpaid-for contribution. He declined to make it the
interest of the proprietors to prefer a certain class of contributors.
The payment was ten guineas a sheet at first, and rose gradually to
double that sum, with increase on special occasions; and even when
rank or other circumstances made remuneration a matter of perfect
indifference, Jeffrey insisted that it should nevertheless be
received. The Czar Peter, when working in the trenches, he was wont to
say, received pay as a common soldier. Another principle which he
rigidly carried out, was that of a thorough independence of publishing
interests. The Edinburgh Review was never made in any manner tributary
to particular bookselling schemes. It assailed or supported with equal
vehemence or heartiness the productions of Albemarle-street and
Paternoster-row. ‘I never asked such a thing of him but once,’ said
the late Mr. Constable, describing an attempt to obtain a favourable
notice from his obdurate Editor, ‘and I assure you the result was no
encouragement to repeat such petitions.’ The book was Scott’s edition
of Swift; and the result one of the bitterest attacks on the
popularity of Swift, in one of Jeffrey’s most masterly criticisms.
He was the better able thus to carry his point, because against more
potent influences he had already taken a decisive stand. It was not
till six years after the Review was started that Scott remonstrated
with Jeffrey on the virulence of its party politics. But much earlier
even than this, the principal proprietors had made the same complaint;
had pushed their objections to the contemplation of Jeffrey’s
surrender of the editorship; and had opened negotiations with writers
known to be bitterly opposed to him. To his honour, Southey declined
these overtures, and advised a compromise of the dispute. Some of the
leading Whigs themselves were discontented, and Horner had appealed to
him from the library of Holland House. Nevertheless, Jeffrey stood
firm. He carried the day against Paternoster-row, and unassailably
established the all-important principle of a perfect independence of
his publishers’ control. He stood as resolute against his friend
Scott; protesting that on one leg, and the weakest, the Review could
not and should not stand, for that its _right leg_ he knew to be
politics. To Horner he replied by carrying the war into the Holland
House country with inimitable spirit and cogency. ‘Do, for Heaven’s
sake, let your Whigs do something popular and effective this session.
Don’t you see the nation is now divided into two, and only two
parties; and that _between_ these stand the Whigs, utterly
inefficient, and incapable of ever becoming efficient, if they will
still maintain themselves at an equal distance from both. You must lay
aside a great part of your aristocratic feelings, and side with the
most respectable and sane of the democrats.’
The vigorous wisdom of the advice was amply proved by subsequent
events, and its courage nobody will doubt who knows anything of what
Scotland was at the time. In office, if not in intellect, the Tories
were supreme. A single one of the Dundases named the sixteen Scots
peers, and forty-three of the Scots commoners; nor was it an
impossible farce, that the sheriff of a county should be the only
freeholder present at the election of a member to represent it in
Parliament, should as freeholder vote himself chairman, should as
chairman receive the oaths and the writ from himself as sheriff,
should as chairman and sheriff sign them, should propose himself as
candidate, declare himself elected, dictate and sign the minutes of
election, make the necessary indenture between the various parties
represented solely by himself, transmit it to the Crown-office, and
take his seat by the same night’s mail to vote with Mr. Addington! We
must recollect such things, when we would really understand the
services of such men as Jeffrey. We must remember the evil and
injustice he so strenuously laboured to remove, and the cost at which
his labour was given. We must bear in mind that he had to face day by
day, in the exercise of his profession, the very men most interested
in the abuses actively assailed, and keenly resolved as far as
possible to disturb and discredit their assailant. ‘Oh, Mr. Smith,’
said Lord Stowell to Sydney, ‘you would have been a much richer man if
you had come over to us!’ This was in effect the sort of thing said to
Jeffrey daily in the Court of Session, and disregarded with generous
scorn. What it is to an advocate to be on the deaf side of ‘the ear of
the Court,’ none but an advocate can know; and this, with Jeffrey, was
the twenty-five years’ penalty imposed upon him for desiring to see
the Catholics emancipated, the consciences of dissenters relieved, the
barbarism of jurisprudence mitigated, and the trade in human souls
abolished.
The Scotch Tories died hard. Worsted in fair fight they resorted to
foul; and among the publications avowedly established for personal
slander of their adversaries, a preeminence so infamous was obtained
by the Beacon, that it disgraced the cause irretrievably. Against this
malignant libeller Jeffrey rose in the Court of Session again and
again, and the result of its last prosecution showed the power of the
party represented by it thoroughly broken. The successful advocate, at
length triumphant even in that Court over the memory of his talents
and virtues elsewhere, had now forced himself into the front rank of
his profession; and they who listened to his advocacy found it even
more marvellous than his criticism, for power, versatility, and
variety. Such rapidity yet precision of thought, such volubility yet
clearness of utterance, left all competitors behind. Hardly any
subject could be so indifferent or uninviting, that this teeming and
fertile intellect did not surround it with a thousand graces of
allusion, illustration, and fanciful expression. He might have
suggested Butler’s hero,
‘—who could not ope
His mouth but out there flew a trope,’
with the difference that each trope flew to its proper mark, each
fancy found its place in the dazzling profusion, and he could at all
times, with a charming and instinctive ease, put the nicest restraints
and checks on his glowing velocity of declamation. A worthy Glasgow
baillie, smarting under an adverse verdict obtained by these
facilities of speech, could find nothing so bitter to advance against
the speaker as a calculation made with the help of Johnson’s
Dictionary, to the effect that Mr. Jeffrey, in the course of a few
hours, had spoken the whole English language twice over!
But the Glasgow baillie made little impression on his fellow citizens;
and from Glasgow came the first public tribute to Jeffrey’s now
achieved position, and legal as well as literary fame. He was elected
Lord Rector of the University in 1821 and 1822. Some seven or eight
years previously he had married the accomplished lady who survives
him, a grandniece of the celebrated Wilkes; and had purchased the
lease of the villa near Edinburgh which he occupied to the time of his
death, and whose romantic woods and grounds will long be associated
with his name. At each step of his career a new distinction now
awaited him, and with every new occasion his unflagging energies
seemed to rise and expand. He never wrote with such masterly success
for his Review as when his whole time appeared to be occupied with
criminal prosecutions, with contested elections, with journeyings from
place to place, with examinings and cross-examinings, with speeches,
addresses, exhortations, denunciations. In all conditions and on all
occasions, a very atmosphere of activity was around him. Even as he
sat, apparently still, waiting to address a jury or amaze a witness,
it made a slow man nervous to look at him. Such a flush of energy
vibrated through that delicate frame, such rapid and never ceasing
thought played on those thin lips, such restless flashes of light
broke from those kindling eyes. You continued to look at him, till his
very silence acted as a spell; and it ceased to be difficult to
associate with his small but well-knit figure even the giant-like
labours and exertions of this part of his astonishing career.
At length, in 1829, he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Advocates;
and thinking it unbecoming that the official head of a great law
corporation should continue the editing of a party organ, he
surrendered the management of the Edinburgh Review. In the year
following, he took office with the Whigs as Lord Advocate, and
replaced Sir James Scarlett in Lord Fitzwilliam’s borough of Malton.
In the next memorable year he contested his native city against a
Dundas; not succeeding in his election, but dealing the last heavy
blow to his opponent’s sinking dynasty. Subsequently he took his seat
as Member for Perth, introduced and carried the Scotch Reform bill,
and in the December of 1832 was declared member for Edinburgh. He had
some great sorrows at this time to check and alloy his triumphs.
Probably no man had gone through a life of eager conflict and active
antagonism with a heart so sensitive to the gentler emotions, and the
deaths of Macintosh and Scott affected him deeply. He had had
occasion, during the illness of the latter, to allude to him in the
House of Commons; and he did this with so much beauty and delicacy,
with such manly admiration of the genius and modest deference to the
opinions of his great Tory friend, that Sir Robert Peel made a journey
across the floor of the house to thank him cordially for it.