The old century left in England few celebrated names to take part in the literature of the new.  The men who made the poems, romances, dramas, reviews, and criticisms for the first quarter of our century had almost all been in youth contemporaries of the Reign of Terror, and had been tried in that unparalleled period as by a fiery furnace, while their opinions were in a formative state.  Crabbe and Rogers were traditions of the time of Goldsmith and Johnson; Gilford wrote with a virulence and ability which he might have learned in boyhood from Junius; but with these exceptions, English literature fifty years ago was represented by young men.

We mention, as the first group of young thinkers, the founders of the “Edinburgh Review,”—­Sydney Smith, Francis Jeffrey, Francis Horner, and Henry Brougham,—­whose united ages, when the first number of that review appeared in 1802, made one hundred and seven years.  Members of the Whig party, possessing much learning and more vivacity and earnestness, and having among them, if not severally, abundance both of daring and prudence, they startled conservative people, evoked the best efforts of authors by their brilliant castigations, and inaugurated the discussion of measures of reform which it took thirty years to get through Parliament.  The critic of the company was Francis Jeffrey, whose happiness it was to live just when he was needed.  Without capacity to excel either in the realm of ideas or of facts, he was unrivalled in the power of discovering the relations between the two.  He was neither a statesman, philosopher, nor poet; but while the heavens and the earth threatened to rush in confusion together, he was an admirable cicerone to the troubled and wandering wits of men.  He had no inherent qualities, and, if other people had not existed, would not have been alive himself; his faculty was simply an eye for relations, and his mental life began when some one threw a series of thoughts across his line of vision.  He could tell all about those thoughts,—­how large each was, what complexion they had, how they stood in order with each other, and how they compared with other thoughts which he remembered having seen before.  Such a mind might have achieved success among the technicalities of the law, but nowhere else, had not the “Edinburgh Review” been created.  Jeffrey’s critical articles have little value when regarded according to their aim and as integral compositions; the arguments which they contain are often insufficient, and the literary judgments wrong.  But they are full of the scattered elements of thought.  Many of the best ideas of the books and men of which they treat are stated in them with admirable clearness and piquancy, and they are, therefore, pleasant secondary sources of information.