e and Lord
John Russell sought to make it the organ of the government.

Napier's successor in 1847 was William Empson, who had contributed to
the _Edinburgh_ since 1823 and who held the editorship until his demise
in 1852. Next followed Sir George Cornewall Lewis, who, however,
resigned in 1855 to become Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord
Palmerston's cabinet. During his regime he wrote less than a score of
articles for the review. His immediate successor was the late Henry
Reeve, whose forty years of faithful service until his death in 1895
brings the review practically to our own day. When Reeve began his
duties by editing No. 206 (April, 1855) Lord Brougham was the only
survivor of the contributors to the original number. In 1857, when a
discussion arose between editor and publisher concerning the
denunciatory attitude assumed by the review toward Lord Palmerston's
ministry, Reeve drew up a list of his contributors at that time,
including Bishop (afterwards Archbishop) Tait, George Grote, John
Forster, M. Guizot, the Duke of Argyll, Rev. Canon Moseley, George S.
Venables, Richard Monckton Milnes and a score of others--most of them
"names of the highest honour and the most consistent adherence to
Liberal principles." Within the four decades that followed, the
personnel of the review has made another almost complete change. A new
group of contributors, under the editorship of Hon. Arthur R.D. Elliot,
is now striving to maintain the standards of old "blue and yellow." A
caustic note in the (1890) Annual Index of _Review of Reviews_ said of
the _Edinburgh_:

"It has long since subsided into a respectable exponent of high and
dry Whiggery, which in these later days has undergone a further
degeneration or evolution into Unionism.... Audacity, wit,
unconventionality, enthusiasm--all these qualities have long since
evaporated, and with them has disappeared the political influence
of the _Edinburgh_."

The two great rivals which are now reaching their centenary[B] are still
the most prominent, in fact the only well-known literary quarterlies of
England. During their life-time many quarterlies have risen, flourished
for a time and perished. The _Westminster Review_, founded 1824, by
Jeremy Bentham, appeared under the editorship of Sir John Bowring and
Henry Southern. As the avowed organ of the Radicals it lost no time in
assailing (principally through the vigorous pens of James Mill and John