These twenty years saw the last attempts in the line of the Addisonian
essay; they saw the beginnings of some modern newspapers which exist at
the present day; they beheld in the _Anti-Jacobin_ perhaps the most
brilliant specimen of political persiflage in newspaper form that had or
has ever been seen. But they did not see--though they saw some fumbling
attempts at it--anything like those strangely different but mutually
complementary examples of periodical criticism which were given just
after the opening of the new age by _The Edinburgh Review_ (1802) and
Cobbett's _Weekly Register_; and they saw nothing at all like the
magazine, or combination of critical and creative matter, in which
_Blackwood_ was, some years later, to lead the way. At the close of the
eighteenth century such magazines were in an exceedingly rudimentary
state, and criticism was mainly still in the hands of the old _Monthly_
and _Critical Reviews_, the respective methods of which had drawn from
Johnson the odd remark that the _Critical_ men, being clever, said
little about their books, which the _Monthly_ men, being "duller
fellows," were glad to read and analyse. These Reviews and their various
contemporaries had indeed from time to time enjoyed the services of men
of the greatest talent, such as Smollett earlier and Southey just at the
last. But, as a rule, they were in the hands of mere hacks; they paid so
wretchedly that no one, unless forced by want or bitten by an amateurish
desire to see himself in print, would contribute to them; they were by
no means beyond suspicion of political and commercial favouritism; and
their critiques were very commonly either mere summaries or scrappy
"puffs" and "slatings," seldom possessing much grace of style, and
scarcely ever adjusted to any scheme of artistic criticism.

This is a history of literature, not of the newspaper press, and it is
necessary to proceed rather by giving account of the authors who were
introduced to the public by--or who, being otherwise known, availed
themselves of--this new development of periodicals. It may be sufficient
to say here that the landmarks of the period, in point of the birth of
papers, are, besides the two above mentioned, the starting of the
_Quarterly Review_ as a Tory opponent to the more and more Whiggish
_Edinburgh_ in 1809, of the _Examiner_ as a Radical weekly in 1808, of
_Blackwood's Magazine_ as a Tory monthly in 1817, of the _London
Magazine_ about the same