The Quarterly Review was the next to come and it was Tory. John Murray, the
London publisher, had been the English distributor of the Edinburgh Review.
In 1809, two considerations moved him to found in London a review to rival
the Scotch periodical. First the Tory party was being hard hit by the
Edinburgh Review and there was need of defense and retaliation. In the
second place, John Murray saw that if his publishing house was to flourish,
it must provide this new form of literature that had become so popular.
For the very shortness of the essays and articles, in which extensive
conditions were summarized for quick digestion, had met with English
approval as well as Scotch. People had become accustomed, says Bagehot, of
taking "their literature in morsels, as they take sandwiches on a journey."
Murray appealed to George Canning, then in office, for assistance and was
introduced to William Gifford as a man capable of the undertaking, who
would also meet the favor of the government party. The rise of the
Quarterly Review was not brilliant. It did not fill the craving for
novelty, inasmuch as the Edinburgh was already in the field. Furthermore,
there is not the opportunity in defense for as conspicuous gallantry as in
offensive warfare.

It was eight years before another enduring review was started. William
Blackwood of Edinburgh had grown like Murray from a bookseller to a
publisher, and he, too, looked for a means of increasing his prestige. He
had launched a review the year previously, in 1816, but it had foundered
when it was scarcely off the ways. His second attempt he was determined
must be successful. His new editors were John G. Lockhart and John Wilson,
and the new policy, although nominally Tory, was first and last the
magazine's notoriety. It hawked its wares into public notice by sensational
articles and personal vilification. Wilson was thirty-two and Lockhart
twenty-three, yet they were as mischievous as boys. In their pages is found
the most abominable raving that has ever passed for literary criticism.
They did not need any party hatred to fire them. William Blackwood
welcomed any abuse that took his magazine out of "the calm of respectable
mediocrity." Anything that stung or startled was welcome to a place in its
pages.

So Blackwood's was published and Edinburgh city, we may be sure, set up a
roar of delight and anger. Never before had one's friends been so assailed.
Never before had one's enemies bee