poetry. Literary courtesy did not exist. Justice gave place generally to
ridicule or sarcasm. The Edinburgh Review was a terror to all
pretenders, and often to men of real merit. But it was published when
most judges were cruel and severe, even in the halls of justice.

The friendship between Scott and Jeffrey had been very close for ten
years before the inception of the Edinburgh Review; and although Scott
was (perhaps growing out of his love for antiquarian researches and
admiration of the things that had been) an inveterate conservative and
Tory, while the new Review was slashingly liberal and progressive, he
was drawn in by friendship and literary interest to be a frequent
contributor during its first three or four years. The politics of the
Edinburgh Review, however, and the establishment in 1808 of the
conservative Quarterly Review, caused a gradual cessation of this
literary connection, without marring the friendly relations between
the two men.

About this time began Scott's friendship with Wordsworth, for whom he
had great respect. Indeed, his modesty led him to prefer everybody's
good poetry to his own. He felt himself inferior not only to Burns, but
also to Wordsworth and Campbell and Coleridge and Byron,--as in many
respects he undoubtedly was; but it requires in an author discernment
and humility of a rare kind, to make him capable of such a
discrimination.

More important to him than any literary friendship was his partnership
with James Ballantyne, the printer, whom he had known from his youth.
This in the end proved unfortunate, and nearly ruined him; for
Ballantyne, though an accomplished man and a fine printer, as well as
enterprising and sensible, was not a safe business man, being