The Advice to a Young Reviewer brings us into a very different sphere of criticism, and has indeed a direct application to our own time.  It was written by Edward Copleston, afterwards Dean of St. Paul’s and Bishop of Llandaff.  Born in February 1776 at Offwell, in Devonshire, Copleston gained in his sixteenth year a scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.  After carrying off the prize for Latin verse, he was elected in 1795 Fellow of Oriel.  In 1800, having been ordained priest, he became Vicar of St. Mary’s.  In 1802 he was elected Professor of Poetry, in which capacity he delivered the lectures subsequently published under the title of Praelectiones Academicae—­a favourite book of Cardinal Newman’s.  In 1814 he succeeded Dr. Eveleigh as Provost of Oriel.  In 1826 he was made Dean of Chester, in 1828 Bishop of Llandaff and Dean of St. Paul’s.  He died at Llandaff, on October 14th, 1849.  Copleston is one of the fathers of modern Oxford, and from his provostship date many of the reforms which transformed the University of Gibbon and Southey into the University of Whateley, of Newman, of Keble, and of Pusey.  The brochure which is printed here was written when Copleston was Fellow and Tutor of Oriel.  It was immediately inspired, not, as is commonly supposed, by the critiques in the Edinburgh Review, but by the critiques in the British Critic, a periodical founded in 1793, and exceedingly influential between that time and about 1812.  Archbishop Whateley, correcting a statement in the Life of Copleston by W.J.  Copleston, says that it was occasioned by a review of Mant’s poems in the British Critic[2].  But on referring to the review of these poems, which appeared in the November number of 1806, plainly the review referred to, we find nothing in it to support Whateley’s assertion.  That the reviews in the British Critic are, however, what Copleston is parodying in the critique of L’Allegro is abundantly clear, but what he says about voyages and travels and about science and recondite learning appear to have reference to articles particularly characteristic of the Edinburgh Review.  It was not, however, till after the date of Copleston’s parody that the Edinburgh Review began conspicuously to illustrate what Copleston here satirises; it was not till a time more recent still that periodical literature generally exemplified in literal seriousness what Copleston intended as extravagant irony.  It is interesting to compare with Copleston’s remarks what Thackeray says on the same subjects in the twenty-fourth chapter of Pendennis, entitled ‘The Pall Mall Gazette.’  This brochure is evidently modelled on Swift’s ‘Digression Concerning Critics’ in the third section of the Tale of a Tub, and owes something also to the Treatise on the Bathos in Pope’s and Swift’s Miscellanies, as the title may have been suggested by Shaftesbury’s Advice to an Author.  The Advice itself and the supplementary critique of Milton are clever and have good points, but they will not bear comparison with the satire of Swift and Pope.