n so grilled. How pleasing for a Tory
fireside was the mud bath with which it defiled Coleridge, who was--and you
had always known it--"little better than a rogue." One's Tory dinner was
the more toothsome for the hot abuse of the Chaldee Manuscript. What stout
Tory, indeed, would doze of an evening on such a sheet! There followed
of course cases of libel. The editors even found it safer, after the
publication of the first number, to retire for a time to the country until
the city cooled.

I choose now to turn to the pages of these three reviews and set out before
you samples of their criticisms, in order that you may contrast them
with our own literary judgments. I warn you in fairness that I have been
disposed to choose the worst, yet there are hundreds of other criticisms
but little better. Of the three reviews, Blackwood's was the least
seriously political in its policy, yet its critical vilifications are the
worst. The Edinburgh Review, the most able of the three and the most in
earnest in politics, is the least vituperative. With this introduction, let
us shake the pepperpot and lay out the strong vinegar of our feast!

In the judgment of the Edinburgh Review, Tom Moore, who had just published
his "Odes and Epistles" but had not yet begun his Irish melodies, is a man
who "with some brilliancy of fancy, and some show of classical erudition
... may boast, if the boast can please him, of being the most licentious of
modern versifiers, and the most poetical of those who, in our times, have
devoted their talents to the propagation of immorality. We regard his book,
indeed, as a public nuisance.... He sits down to ransact the impure places
of his memory for inflammatory images and expressions, and commits them
laboriously in writing, for the purpose of insinuating pollution into the
minds of unknown and unsuspecting readers."

Francis Jeffrey wrote this, and Moore challenged him to fight. The police
interfered, and as Jeffrey put it, "the affair ended amicably. We have
since breakfasted together very lovingly. He has expressed penitence for
what he has written and declared that he will never again apply any little
talents he may possess to such purpose: and I have said that I shall be
happy to praise him whenever I find that he has abjured these objectionable
topics." It was Sydney Smith who said of Jeffrey he would "damn the solar
system--bad light--planets too distant--pestered with comets. Feeble
contrivance--could