may probably improve, and I will not quit this country without
commissioning some one here to send you anything that may be of use to
so promising a publication as your _Review_."

No sooner was one number published, than preparations were made for the
next. Every periodical is a continuous work--never ending, still
beginning. New contributors must be gained; new books reviewed; new
views criticised. Mr. Murray was, even more than the editor, the
backbone of the enterprise: he was indefatigable in soliciting new
writers for the _Quarterly_, and in finding the books fit for review,
and the appropriate reviewers of the books. Sometimes the reviews were
printed before the editor was consulted, but everything passed under the
notice of Gifford, and received his emendations and final approval.

Mr. Murray went so far as to invite Leigh Hunt to contribute an article
on Literature or Poetry for the _Quarterly_. The reply came from John
Hunt, Leigh's brother. He said:

_Mr. John Hunt to John Murray_.

"My brother some days back requested me to present to you his thanks for
the polite note you favoured him with on the subject of the _Review_, to
which he should have been most willing to have contributed in the manner
you propose, did he not perceive that the political sentiments contained
in it are in direct opposition to his own."

This was honest, and it did not interfere with the personal intercourse
of the publisher and the poet. Murray afterwards wrote to Scott: "Hunt
is most vilely wrong-headed in politics, which he has allowed to turn
him away from the path of elegant criticism, which might have led him to