The English statesman and author John Morley, Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838-1923), was one of the principal Victorian expositors of the ideas of the Enlightenment. He was a leader of the Liberal party, which drew nourishment from those ideas.

John Morley was born at Blackburn on Dec. 24, 1838. He left Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1859 to pursue a literary career in London. He was editor of several periodicals and was known as an incisive reviewer with radical sympathies. His major achievement in journalism was his conduct of the Fortnightly Review, which he edited with great distinction from 1867 to 1883. He was also editor of Macmillan's Magazine for a short time. For Macmillan's, Morley also edited the "English Men of Letters Series," starting in 1878. To it he contributed the volume on Edmund Burke (1879), one of the best of the series.

Morley's career as a critic generally either preceded his election to Parliament...