literature of the new. The men who made the poems, romances, dramas,
reviews, and criticisms for the first quarter of our century had almost
all been in youth contemporaries of the Reign of Terror, and had been
tried in that unparalleled period as by a fiery furnace, while their
opinions were in a formative state. Crabbe and Rogers were traditions of
the time of Goldsmith and Johnson; Gilford wrote with a virulence and
ability which he might have learned in boyhood from Junius; but with
these exceptions, English literature fifty years ago was represented by
young men.

We mention, as the first group of young thinkers, the founders of the
"Edinburgh Review,"--Sydney Smith, Francis Jeffrey, Francis Horner, and
Henry Brougham,--whose united ages, when the first number of that review
appeared in 1802, made one hundred and seven years. Members of the Whig
party, possessing much learning and more vivacity and earnestness,
and having among them, if not severally, abundance both of daring and
prudence, they startled conservative people, evoked the best efforts of
authors by their brilliant castigations, and inaugurated the discussion
of measures of reform which it took thirty years to get through
Parliament. The critic of the company was Francis Jeffrey, whose
happiness it was to live just when he was needed. Without capacity to
excel either in the realm of ideas or of facts, he was unrivalled in the
power of discovering the relations between the two. He was neither a
statesman, philosopher, nor poet; but while the heavens and the earth
threatened to rush in confusion together, he was an admirable _cicerone_
to the troubled and wandering wits of men. He had no inherent qualities,
and, if other people had not existed, would not have been alive himself;
his faculty was simply an eye for relations, and his mental life began
when some one threw a series of thoughts across his line of vision.
He could tell all about those thoughts,--how large each was, what