colours in his hat; James Montgomery was
expiating in York Jail his exulting ballad
on the Fall of the Bastille; and Southey
and Coleridge, in despair of old England,
had completed the arrangements of their
youthful colony for a community of property,
and proscription of everything selfish, on the
banks of the Susquehana;—but the Speculative
orators rarely probed the sores of the
body politic deeper than an inquiry into the
practical advantages of belief in a future
state? and whether it was for the interest of
Britain to maintain the balance of Europe? or
if knowledge could be too much disseminated
among the lower ranks of the people?

In short, nothing of the extravagance
of the time, on either side, is associable
with the outset of Jeffrey's career. As little
does he seem to have been influenced, on
the one hand, by the democratic foray of some
two hundred convention delegates into
Edinburgh in 1792, as, on the other, by the
prominence of his father's name to a protest of
frantic high-tory defiance; and he was justified
not many years since in referring with pride to
the fact that, at the opening of his public life,
his view of the character of the first French
revolution, and of its probable influence on
other countries, had been such as to require
little modification during the whole of his
subsequent career. The precision and accuracy
of his judgment had begun to show itself
thus early. At the crude young Jacobins,
so soon to ripen into Quarterly Reviewers,
who were just now coquetting with Mary
Woolstonecraft, or making love to the ghost
of Madame Roland, or branding as worthy of
the bowstring the tyrannical enormities of
Mr. Pitt, he could afford to laugh from the
first. From the very first he had the strongest
liberal tendencies, but restrained them so
wisely that he could cultivate them well.

He joined the band of youths who then sat
at the feet of Dugald Stewart, and whose first
incentive to distinction in the more difficult
paths of knowledge, as well as their almost
universal adoption of the liberal school of
politics, are in some degree attributable to the
teaching of that distinguished man. Among
them were Brougham and Horner, who had
played together from boyhood in Edinburgh
streets, had joined the Speculative on the same
evening six years after Jeffrey (who in
Brougham soon found a sharp opponent on
colonial and other matters), and were still
fast friends. Jeffrey's father, raised to a
deputy clerk of session, now lived on a third or
fourth flat in Buchanan's Court in the Lawn
Market, where the worthy old gentleman
kept two women servants and a man at
livery; but where the furniture does not
seem to have been of the soundest. This
fact his son used to illustrate by an anecdote
of the old gentleman eagerly setting-to at
a favourite dinner one day, with the two
corners of the table cloth tied round his neck
to protect his immense professional frills,
when the leg of his chair gave way, and he
tumbled back on the floor with all the dishes,
sauces, and viands a-top of him. Father and
son lived here together, till the latter took for
his first wife the daughter of the Professor of
Hebrew in the University of St. Andrew, and
moved to an upper story in another part of
town. He had been called to the bar in 1794,
and was married eight years afterward. He
had not meanwhile obtained much practice,
and the elevation implied in removal to an
upper flat is not of the kind that a young
Benedict covets. But distinction of another
kind was at length at hand.

One day early in 1802, 'in the eighth or
ninth story or flat in Buccleugh Place, the
elevated residence of the then Mr. Jeffrey,'
Mr. Jeffrey had received a visit from Horner
and Sydney Smith, when Sydney, at this time
a young English curate temporarily resident
in Edinburgh, preaching, teaching, and joking
with a flow of wit, humanity, and sense that
fascinated everybody, started the notion of the
Edinburgh Review. The two Scotchmen
at once voted the Englishman its editor,
and the notion was communicated to John
Archibald Murray (Lord Advocate after
Jeffrey, long years afterward), John Allen
(then lecturing on medical subjects at the
University, but who went abroad before he
could render any essential service), and
Alexander Hamilton (afterwards Sanscrit
professor at Haileybury). This was the first
council; but it was extended, after a few
days, till the two Thomsons (John and
Thomas, the physician and the advocate),
Thomas Brown (who succeeded to Dugald
Stewart's chair), and Henry Brougham, were
admitted to the deliberations. Horner's
quondam playfellow was an ally too potent to
be obtained without trouble; and, even thus
early, had not a few characteristics in common
with the Roman statesman and orator whom
it was his greatest ambition in after life to
resemble, and of whom Shakspeare has told
us that he never followed anything that other
men began.

' You remember how cheerfully Brougham
approved of our plan at first,' wrote Jeffrey
to Horner, in April, in the thick of anxious
preparations for the start, 'and agreed to
give us an article or two without hesitation.
Three or four days ago I proposed two or three
books that I thought would suit him; when
he answered, with perfect good humour, that
he had changed his view of our plan a little,
and rather thought now that he should
decline to have any connection with it.' This
little coquetry was nevertheless overcome;
and before the next six months were over,
Brougham had become an efficient and
zealous member of the band.

It is curious to see how the project hung fire at
first. Jeffrey had nearly finished four articles,
Horner had partly written four, and more
than half the number was printed; and yet
well-nigh the other half had still to be written.