Smith was made editor and kept the position until after the appearance of the first number, when Jeffrey succeeded him.  The Review became immediately a power, appearing quarterly and striking its blows anonymously against a sluggish government, lashing the Tory writers, and taking its part, which is of greater consequence, in the promulgation of the Whig reforms which were to ripen in thirty years and convert the old into modern England.  In the destruction of outworn things, it was, as it were, a magazine of Whig explosives.

The Quarterly Review was the next to come and it was Tory.  John Murray, the London publisher, had been the English distributor of the Edinburgh Review.  In 1809, two considerations moved him to found in London a review to rival the Scotch periodical.  First the Tory party was being hard hit by the Edinburgh Review and there was need of defense and retaliation.  In the second place, John Murray saw that if his publishing house was to flourish, it must provide this new form of literature that had become so popular.  For the very shortness of the essays and articles, in which extensive conditions were summarized for quick digestion, had met with English approval as well as Scotch.  People had become accustomed, says Bagehot, of taking “their literature in morsels, as they take sandwiches on a journey.”  Murray appealed to George Canning, then in office, for assistance and was introduced to William Gifford as a man capable of the undertaking, who would also meet the favor of the government party.  The rise of the Quarterly Review was not brilliant.  It did not fill the craving for novelty, inasmuch as the Edinburgh was already in the field.  Furthermore, there is not the opportunity in defense for as conspicuous gallantry as in offensive warfare.

It was eight years before another enduring review was started.  William Blackwood of Edinburgh had grown like Murray from a bookseller to a publisher, and he, too, looked for a means of increasing his prestige.  He had launched a review the year previously, in 1816, but it had foundered when it was scarcely off the ways.  His second attempt he was determined must be successful.  His new editors were John G. Lockhart and John Wilson, and the new policy, although nominally Tory, was first and last the magazine’s notoriety.  It hawked its wares into public notice by sensational articles and personal vilification.  Wilson was thirty-two and Lockhart twenty-three, yet they were as mischievous as boys.  In their pages is found the most abominable raving that has ever passed for literary criticism.  They did not need any party hatred to fire them.  William Blackwood welcomed any abuse that took his magazine out of “the calm of respectable mediocrity.”  Anything that stung or startled was welcome to a place in its pages.