uly
stimulating. The rapid advance in population, wealth, education, and the
means of communication has vastly increased the number of readers. Every
one who has any thing to say can say it in print, and is sure of some
sort of a hearing. A special feature of the time is the multiplication
of periodicals. The great London dailies, like the _Times_ and the
_Morning Post_, which were started during the last quarter of the 18th
century, were something quite new in journalism. The first of the modern
reviews, the _Edinburgh_, was established in 1802, as the organ of the
Whig party in Scotland. This was followed by the _London Quarterly_, in
1808, and by _Blackwood's Magazine_, in 1817, both in the Tory interest.
The first editor of the _Edinburgh_ was Francis Jeffrey, who assembled
about him a distinguished corps of contributors, including the versatile
Henry Brougham, afterward a great parliamentary orator and
lord-chancellor of England, and the Rev. Sydney Smith, whose witty
sayings are still current. The first editor of the _Quarterly_ was
William Gifford, a satirist, who wrote the _Baviad_ and _Maeviad_ in
ridicule of literary affectations. He was succeeded in 1824 by James
Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law of Walter Scott, and the author of an
excellent _Life of Scott_. _Blackwood's_ was edited by John Wilson,
Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, who, under
the pen-name of "Christopher North," contributed to his magazine a series
{224} of brilliant, imaginary dialogues between famous characters of the
day, entitled _Noctes Ambrosianae_, because they were supposed to take
place at Ambrose's tavern in Edinburgh. These papers were full of a
profuse, headlong eloquence, of humor, literary criticism, and
personalities interspersed with songs expressive of a roystering and
convivial Toryism and an uproarious contempt for Whigs and cockneys.
These reviews and magazines, and others which sprang up beside them,
became the _nuclei_ about which the wit and scholarship of both parties
gathered. Political controversy under the Regency and the reign of
George IV. was thus carried on more regularly by permanent organs, and no
longer so largely by privateering, in the shape of pamphlets, like
Swift's _Public Spirit of the Whigs_, Johnson's _Taxation No Tyranny_,
and Burke's _Reflections on the Revolution in France_. Nor did politics
by any means usurp the columns of the reviews. Literature, art, scien