or nine hours' movement was yet in embryo, the
Sheriff of a county embracing a third of the population of Scotland was
able to accomplish.

Born in Glasgow in 1805, Sheriff Bell is descended from an honourable
and honoured family. His father followed the practice of the law, and
educated Henry to the same career. It did not seem, however, as if the
son cared to have his father's mantle falling upon him. After receiving
the rudiments of his education at the High School of Glasgow, he
proceeded to Edinburgh, where he commenced to go through a regular
University curriculum. So far as the Scottish metropolis was concerned,
the first quarter of the present century was the Augustan age of
literature. Sir Walter Scott was in his meridian. De Quincey, under the
influence of the "Circean spells" of opium, was making _Blackwood_ a
power in the land. Sir William Hamilton, the greatest British supporter
of _a priori_ philosophy in this century, had just been appointed to the
Chair of Civil History. Through the columns of the _Edinburgh Review_,
Francis Jeffrey was "propounding heresies of all sorts against the
ruling fancies of the day, whether political, poetical, or social." John
Wilson, "Christopher North," that "monster of erudition," was acting as
the animating soul of his celebrated magazine. Amid such a galaxy of
brilliant constellations, Henry Bell graduated for a literary career,
and he was not esteemed the least of the parhelions that shone around
the fixed stars in that spacious intellectual firmament. By contact and
association with such men, he enjoyed exceptional facilities for
qualifying himself as an author; and having the "root of the matter" in
him, he published, in rapid succession, poems, sketches, and reviews
that were more than sufficient to justify the compliment which the
Ettrick Shepherd years afterwards pronounced upon them, when he said,
"Man, Henry, it was a great pity ye didna stick to literature; 'od,
Sir, ye micht hae done something at literature."

Finding, perhaps, that his tastes were literary rather than legal--that
he had a greater aptitude for _belles lettres_ than jurisprudence--young
Bell, on the 15th November, 1828, undertook the Editorship of the
_Edinburgh Literary Journal_. He was then twenty-three years of age. The
_Journal_ professed to be a "weekly register of criticism and _belles
lettres_." It contained fourteen pages of royal octavo, and its price
was sixpence. The motto of the _Lit