Francis Jeffrey, of whom Lockhart, later one of the leading lights of Blackwood’s, says, “It is impossible to conceive the existence of a more fertile, teeming intellect”,4 was the first editor and remained so until 1829. In the first number, October 1802, there were twenty-nine articles, contributed by Sydney Smith, Jeffrey, Francis Horner, Brougham, and Thomson, Murray and Hamilton. During its first three years the Review distinguished itself by adding such names to its list as Walter Scott, Playfair, John Allen, George Ellis, and Henry Hallam. With such pens supporting it, it would have been strange if it had not been readable. There was indeed an air of vitality and energy throughout, which distinguished it from any of its forerunners; it spoke as one having authority; and men turned as instinctively to Francis Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Review for final verdicts, as it never entered their heads to seriously consider the Gentleman’s Magazine or even the Quarterly.

This first number, October 1802, is as representative as any. Jeffrey wrote the first article, reviewing a book on the causes of the revolution by Mounier, late president of the French National Assembly. There was an article by Francis Horner on “The Paper Credit of Great Britain”; one by Brougham on “The Crisis in the Sugar Colonies”. Another by Jeffrey, a criticism of Southey’s “Thalaba”, indicates the young editor’s intention to live up to the motto of the Review:—“Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur—The Judge is damned when the offender is freed”. With Jeffrey anything new in the world of letters was taboo, and Southey he considered “a champion and apostle” of a school of poetry which was nothing if not new. Quoting him: “Southey is the first of these brought before us for judgment, and we cannot discharge our inquisitorial office conscientiously without pronouncing a few words upon the nature and tendency of the tenets he has helped to propagate”.5 Notice that Jeffrey uses the term “inquisitorial office”, therein pleading guilty to the very attitude of which Lockhart accused him, and in opposition to which in Blackwood’s Magazine he later took such a decided stand, offending how similarly, we are later to discover.

Lockhart admired Jeffrey and praised his talents; it was the use to which he put those talents that Lockhart assailed. The following words of Lockhart’s own, even though tinged with that exaggerated vindictiveness so characteristic of him, give a pretty fair idea of the attitude he and all the Blackwood group took against Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Review; and shows the spirit underlying the rivalry that took root before ever Blackwood’s Magazine existed and prevailed for ever after. “Endowed by nature with a keen talent for sarcasm (Jeffrey, that is) nothing could be more easy for him than to fasten, with the destructive effect of nonchalance upon a work which had perhaps been composed with much earnestness of thought on the part of the author.... The object of the critic, however, is by no means to assist those who read his critical lucubrations, to enter with more facility, or with better preparation into the thoughts or feelings or truths which his author endeavors to inculcate or illustrate. His object is merely to make the author look foolish; and he prostitutes his own fine talents, to enable the common herd”6—to look down upon the deluded author who is victim of the Review. This is what Lockhart considered Jeffrey to be doing, and he was not alone in his opinion. It is to be remembered, however, that Lockhart’s attitude was always more tense, keener, and a little more bitter than others’, yet his words better than any one else’s sound the keynote of the deadly opposition to the Review which “Maga” assumed from the first. Quoting him again, "The Edinburgh Review cared very little for what might be done, or might be hoped to be done, provided it could exercise a despotic authority in deciding on the merits of what was done. Nobody could ever regard this work as a great fostering-mother of the infant manifestations of intellectual and imaginative power. It was always sufficiently plain, that in all things its chief object was to support the credit of its own appearance. It praised only where praise was extorted—and it never praised even the highest efforts of contemporary genius in the spirit of true and genuine earnestness which might have been becoming”.7 Lockhart never quite forgave Jeffrey for failing instantly to recognize the genius of Wordsworth. He continues, of the Reviewers: “They never spoke out of the fulness of the heart in praising any one of our great living poets, the majesty of whose genius would have been quite enough to take away all ideas except those of prostrate respect”.8 Taking all of Lockhart’s impetuosity with a pinch of salt, the fact remains undeniably true that the Edinburgh assumed the patronizing air of bestowing rather than recognizing honor when it praised.

Among the builders of the Edinburgh Henry Brougham stands one of the foremost. In five years he contributed as many as eighty articles, an average of four each number, and it is said that he once wrote an entire number. He was capable of it! Brougham was a powerful politician, but unfortunately did not limit his contributions to political subjects. He