are, at least the best of them, much
less merely periodical writers than those who came immediately before
them. In part no doubt this was accident; in part it was due to the
greater prominence which novels and serial works of other kinds were
beginning to assume; in part it may be to the fact that the great
increase in the number of magazines and newspapers had lowered their
individual dignity and perhaps their profitableness. But it is certain
that of the list just mentioned, Thackeray and Carlyle, of the
contemporary new generation of the _Edinburgh_ Macaulay, of the nascent
_Westminster_ Mill, and others, were not, like Jeffrey, like Sydney
Smith, like Wilson, and like De Quincey, content to write articles. They
aspired to write, and they did write, books; and, that being so, they
will all be treated in chapters other than the present, appropriated to
the kinds in which their chief books were designed.

The name of John Sterling is that of a man who, with no great literary
claims of his own, managed to connect it durably and in a double fashion
with literature, first as the subject of an immortal biography by
Carlyle, secondly as the name-giver of the famous Sterling Club, which
about 1838, and hardly numbering more members than the century did
years, included a surprising proportion of the most rising men of
letters of the day, while all but a very few of its members were of
literary mark. John Sterling himself was the son of a rather eccentric
father, Edward Sterling, who, after trying soldiering with no great, and
farming with decidedly ill, success, turned to journalism and succeeded
brilliantly on the _Times_. His son was born in the Isle of Bute on 20th
July 1806, was educated, first privately, then at Glasgow, and when
about nineteen went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he fell in with
a famous and brilliant set. He migrated from Trinity College to Trinity
Hall, took no degree, wrote a little for the then young _Athenaeum_, was
engaged in a romantic and in all ways rather unfortunate business of
encouraging a rebellion in Spain, but married instead of taking active
part in it, and went to the West Indies. When he came home he, it is
said under Coleridgean influence, took orders, but soon developed
heterodox views and gave up active duty. He lived, though under sentence
of death by consumption, till 1843, spending much time abroad, but
writing a little, chiefly for periodicals.

The chief characteristic