project, of a purely literary periodical, to be edited by Mr. Henry
Southern, afterwards a diplomatist, then a literary man by profession.
The two editors agreed to unite their corps, and divide the editorship,
Bowring taking the political, Southern the literary department.
Southern's Review was to have been published by Longman, and that firm,
though part proprietors of the _Edinburgh_, were willing to be the
publishers of the new journal. But when all the arrangements had been
made, and the prospectuses sent out, the Longmans saw my father's attack
on the _Edinburgh_, and drew back. My father was now appealed to for his
interest with his own publisher, Baldwin, which was exerted with a
successful result. And so in April, 1824, amidst anything but hope on my
father's part, and that of most of those who afterwards aided in
carrying on the _Review_, the first number made its appearance.

That number was an agreeable surprise to most of us. The average of the
articles was of much better quality than had been expected. The literary
and artistic department had rested chiefly on Mr. Bingham, a barrister
(subsequently a police magistrate), who had been for some years a
frequenter of Bentham, was a friend of both the Austins, and had adopted
with great ardour Mr. Bentham's philosophical opinions. Partly from
accident, there were in the first number as many as five articles by
Bingham; and we were extremely pleased with them. I well remember the
mixed feeling I myself had about the _Review_; the joy of finding, what
we did not at all expect, that it was sufficiently good to be capable of
being made a creditable organ of those who held the opinions it
professed; and extreme vexation, since it was so good on the whole, at
what we thought the blemishes of it. When, however, in addition to our
generally favourable opinion of it, we learned that it had an
extraordinary large sale for a first number, and found that the
appearance of a Radical Review, with pretensions equal to those of the