ith on our bookstalls.

But among the other great changes produced by the French Revolution,
there was a striking and very important change effected in our
periodical literature. The old foundations of society seemed breaking
up, and the true nature of that basis of opinion on which they had so
long rested came to be everywhere practically understood.

Minds of the larger order found it necessary to address themselves
direct to the people; and the newspaper, the review, the magazine, the
pamphlet, furnished them with ready vehicles of conveyance.
Archimedes, during the siege of Syracuse, had to quit the sober quiet
of his study, and to mix with the armed defenders of his native city,
amid the wild confusion of sallies and assaults, the rocking of
beleaguered towers, the creaking of engines, and the hurtling of
missiles. It was thus with some of the greatest minds of the country
during the distraction and alarm of the French Revolution. Coleridge
conducted a newspaper; Sir James Mackintosh wrote for one; Canning
contributed to the _Anti-Jacobin_; Robert Hall of Leicester became a
reviewer; Southey, Jeffrey, Brougham, Scott, Giffard, all men in the
first rank, appeared in the character of contributors to the
periodicals.

The aspect of this department of literature suddenly changed, and the
influence of that change survives to this day. Even now, some of our
first literary names are known chiefly in their connection with
magazines and reviews. Men such as Macaulay and Sidney Smith have
scarce any place as authors dissociated from the _Edinburgh_; and
Lockhart and Wilson are most felt in the world of letters in their
connection with _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_. And this change
affected more than the periodicals. Its influence extended to works of
the encyclopaediacal character. The two great Encyclopaedias of
Edinburgh--that which bears the name of the city, and that whose name
we have placed at the head of this article--came to reckon among their
contributors the first men of the kingdom, both in science and
literature: they benefited as greatly by the change we describe as the
periodicals themselves. The Revolution, in its reflex influence, seems
to have drawn a line in the British encyclopaediacal field between the
labours of mere compilers and the achievements of original authorship;
and the peculiarity of plan in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, to which
we have already referred--that peculiarity which gives an