may at least try to take
away his character.

We do not implicitly bow to the political opinions, nor to the critical
decisions of the _Edinburgh Review_; but we must do justice to the
talent with which they are supported, and to the tone of manly
explicitness in which they are delivered.[A] They are eminently
characteristic of the Spirit of the Age; as it is the express object of
the _Quarterly Review_ to discountenance and extinguish that spirit,
both in theory and practice. The _Edinburgh Review_ stands upon
the ground of opinion; it asserts the supremacy of intellect: the
pre-eminence it claims is from an acknowledged superiority of talent and
information and literary attainment, and it does not build one tittle
of its influence on ignorance, or prejudice, or authority, or personal
malevolence. It takes up a question, and argues it _pro_ and _con_ with
great knowledge and boldness and skill; it points out an absurdity, and
runs it down, fairly, and according to the evidence adduced. In the
former case, its conclusions may be wrong, there may be a bias in the
mind of the writer, but he states the arguments and circumstances on
both sides, from which a judgment is to be formed--it is not his cue,
he has neither the effrontery nor the meanness to falsify facts or to
suppress objections. In the latter case, or where a vein of sarcasm or
irony is resorted to, the ridicule is not barbed by some allusion (false
or true) to private history; the object of it has brought the infliction
on himself by some literary folly or political delinquency which is
referred to as the understood and justifiable provocation, instead
of being held up to scorn as a knave for not being a tool, or as a
blockhead for thinking for himself. In the _Edinburgh Review_ the
talents of those on the opposite side are always extolled _pleno
ore_--in the _Quarterly Review_ they are denied altogether, and the
justice that is in this way withheld from them is compensated by a
proportionable supply of personal abuse. A man of genius who is a lord,
and who publishes with Mr. Murray, may now and then stand as good a
chance as a lord who is not a man of genius and who publishes with
Messrs. Longman: but that is the utmost extent of the impartiality of
the _Quarterly_. From its account you would take Lord Byron and Mr.
Stuart Rose for two very pretty poets; but Mr. Moore's Magdalen Muse is
sent to Bridewell without mercy, to beat hemp in silk-stockings. In
the