Scotch
professors, cannot for one single moment be compared with the work
which, in Jeffrey's own later days, in those of Macvey Napier, and in
the earlier ones of Empson, was contributed by Hazlitt, by Carlyle, by
Stephen, and, above all, by Macaulay. The _Review_ never had any one who
could emulate the ornateness of De Quincey or Wilson, the pure and
perfect English of Southey, or the inimitable insolence, so polished and
so intangible, of Lockhart. But it may at least claim that it led the
way, and that the very men who attacked its principles and surpassed its
practice had, in some cases, been actually trained in its school, and
were in all, imitating and following its model. To analyse, with
chemical exactness, the constituents of a literary novelty is never
easy, if it is ever possible. But some of the contrasts between the
style of criticism most prevalent at the time, and the style of the new
venture are obvious and important. The older rivals of the _Edinburgh_
maintained for the most part a decent and amiable impartiality; the
_Edinburgh_, whatever it pretended to be, was violently partisan,
unhesitatingly personal, and more inclined to find fault, the more
distinguished the subject was. The reviews of the time had got into the
hands either of gentlemen and ladies who were happy to be thought
literary, and only too glad to write for nothing, or else into those of
the lowest booksellers' hacks, who praised or blamed according to
orders, wrote without interest and without vigour, and were quite
content to earn the smallest pittance. The _Edinburgh_ started from the
first on the principle that its contributors should be paid, and paid
well, whether they liked it or not, thus establishing at once an
inducement to do well and a check on personal eccentricity and
irresponsibility; while whatever partisanship there might be in its
pages, there was at any rate no mere literary puffery.

From being, but for his private studies, rather an idle person, Jeffrey
became an extremely busy one. The _Review_ gave him not a little
occupation, and his practice increased rapidly. In 1803 the institution,
at Scott's suggestion, of the famous Friday Club, in which, for the
greater part of the first half of this century, the best men in
Edinburgh, Johnstone and Maxwell, Whig and Tory alike, met in peaceable
conviviality, did a good deal to console Jeffrey, who was now as much
given to company as he had been in his early youth to sol