n the least finished on its own
scheme of the great styles in English. For the irony of Swift, of which,
except in its very roughest and most rudimentary forms, Cobbett had no
command or indeed conception, it substitutes a slogging directness
nowhere else to be found equalled for combination of strength and, in
the pugilistic sense, "science"; while its powers of description, within
certain limits, are amazing. Although Cobbett's newspaper was itself as
much of an Ishmaelite and an outsider as its director, it is almost
impossible to exaggerate the effect which it had in developing
newspapers generally, by the popularity which it acquired, and the
example of hammer-and-tongs treatment of political and economic subjects
which it set. The faint academic far-off-ness of the eighteenth century
handling, which is visible even in the much-praised _Letters of Junius_,
which is visible in the very ferocity of Smollett's _Adventures of an
Atom_, which put up with "Debates of the Senate of Lilliput" and so
forth, has been blown away to limbo, and the newspaper (at first at some
risk) takes men and measures, politics and policies, directly and in
their own names, to be its province and its prey.

It is a far cry from Cobbett to the founders of the _Edinburgh Review_,
who, very nearly at the same time as that at which he launched his
_Register_, did for the higher and more literary kind of periodical what
he was doing for the lower and vernacular kind. I say the founders,
because there is a still not quite settled dispute whether Francis
Jeffrey or Sydney Smith was the actual founder of the famous "Blue and
Yellow." This dispute is not uninteresting; because the one was as
typically Scotch, with some remarkable differences from other Scotchmen,
as the other was essentially English, with some points not commonly
found in men of English blood. Jeffrey, the younger of the two by a
couple of years, was still a member of the remarkable band who, as has
been noticed so often already, were all born in the early seventies of
the eighteenth century; and his own birthday was 23rd October 1773. He
was an Edinburgh man; and his father, who was of a respectable though
not distinguished family, held office in the Court of Session and was a
strong Tory. Jeffrey does not seem to have objected to his father's
profession, though he early revolted from his politics; and, after due
study at the High School of his birthplace, and the Universities of
Gl