t they have done their utmost to hasten the fulfilment of their own
prophecy.' Yet, he adds, 9,000 copies are printed quarterly, 'no genteel
family _can_ pretend to be without it,' and it contains the only
valuable literary criticism of the day. The antidote was to be supplied
by the foundation of the 'Quarterly.' The Cevallos article, as Brougham
says, 'first made the Reviewers conspicuous as Liberals.'

Jeffrey and his friends were in fact in the very difficult position of
all middle parties during a period of intense national and patriotic
excitement. If they attacked Perceval or Canning or Castlereagh in one
direction, they were equally opposed to the rough-and-ready democracy of
Cobbett or Burdett, and to the more philosophical radicalism of men like
Godwin or Bentham. They were generally too young to have been infected
by the original Whig sympathy for the French Revolution, or embittered
by the reaction. They condemned the principles of '89 as decidedly if
not as heartily as the Tories. The difference, as Sydney Smith said to
his imaginary Tory, Abraham Plymley, is 'in the means, not in the end.
We both love the Constitution, respect the King, and abhor the French.'
Only, as the difference about the means was diametrical, Tories
naturally held them to be playing into the hands of destructives, though
more out of cowardice than malignity. In such a position it is not
surprising if the Reviewers generally spoke in apologetic terms and with
bated breath. They could protest against the dominant policy as rash and
bigoted, but could not put forwards conflicting principles without
guarding themselves against the imputation of favouring the common
enemy. The Puritans of Radicalism set down this vacillation to a total
want of fixed principle, if not to baser motives. The first volume of
the 'Westminster Review' (1824) contains a characteristic assault upon
the 'see-saw' system of the 'Edinburgh' by the two Mills. The
'Edinburgh' is sternly condemned for its truckling to the aristocracy,
its cowardice, political immorality, and (of all things!) its
sentimentalism. In after years J. S. Mill contributed to its pages
himself; but the opinion of his fervid youth was that of the whole
Bentham school.[22] It is plain, however, that the 'Review,' even when
it had succeeded, did not absorb the activities of its contributors so
exclusively as is sometimes suggested. They rapidly dispersed to enter
upon different careers. Even befor