Mr. Malthus’s style is correct and elegant; his tone of controversy mild and gentlemanly; and the care with which he has brought his facts and documents together, deserves the highest praise.  He has lately quitted his favourite subject of population, and broke a lance with Mr. Ricardo on the question of rent and value.  The partisans of Mr. Ricardo, who are also the admirers of Mr. Malthus, say that the usual sagacity of the latter has here failed him, and that he has shewn himself to be a very illogical writer.  To have said this of him formerly on another ground, was accounted a heresy and a piece of presumption not easily to be forgiven.  Indeed Mr. Malthus has always been a sort of “darling in the public eye,” whom it was unsafe to meddle with.  He has contrived to make himself as many friends by his attacks on the schemes of Human Perfectibility and on the Poor-Laws, as Mandeville formerly procured enemies by his attacks on Human Perfections and on Charity-Schools; and among other instances that we might mention, Plug Pulteney, the celebrated miser, of whom Mr. Burke said on his having a large estate left him, “that now it was to be hoped he would set up a pocket-handkerchief,” was so enamoured with the saving schemes and humane economy of the Essay, that he desired a friend to find out the author and offer him a church living!  This liberal intention was (by design or accident) unhappily frustrated.

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MR. GIFFORD.

Mr. Gifford was originally bred to some handicraft:  he afterwards contrived to learn Latin, and was for some time an usher in a school, till he became a tutor in a nobleman’s family.  The low-bred, self-taught man, the pedant, and the dependant on the great contribute to form the Editor of the Quarterly Review.  He is admirably qualified for this situation, which he has held for some years, by a happy combination of defects, natural and acquired; and in the event of his death, it will be difficult to provide him a suitable successor.

Mr. Gifford has no pretensions to be thought a man of genius, of taste, or even of general knowledge.  He merely understands the mechanical and instrumental part of learning.  He is a critic of the last age, when the different editions of an author, or the dates of his several performances were all that occupied the inquiries of a profound scholar, and the spirit of the writer or the beauties of his style were left to shift for themselves, or exercise the fancy of the light and superficial reader.  In studying an old author, he has no notion of any thing beyond adjusting a point, proposing a different reading, or correcting, by the collation of various copies, an error of the press.  In appreciating a modern one, if it is an enemy, the first thing he thinks of is to charge him with bad grammar—­he scans his sentences instead of weighing his sense; or if