To attempt a chapter upon the religious element in the work of the writers for whom this title stands may seem like undertaking an essay upon the Greek Kalends or the seacoast of Bohemia. The reader's first thought is likely to be that, whatever may have been the personal religious convictions of these men, their published works have "no religion to speak of"; certainly no religious significance for a later day. Has not Mr. Bagehot specifically noted the fact?

“A curious abstinence from religious topics [he says] characterizes the original Review. There is a wonderful omission of this most natural topic of speculation in the lives of Horner and Jeffrey. In truth, it would seem that, living in the incessant din of a Calvinistic country, the best course for thoughtful and serious men was to be silent-at least they instinctively thought so. They felt no involuntary call to be theological teachers themselves, and gently recoiled from the coarse admonition around them." "

1

Yet Bagehot has himself answered his own im

1 Bagehot, "The First Edinburgh Reviewers," Literary Studies, vol. i, pp. 183–184.

plied question; for in a memorable estimate and criticism of the Whig character in the essay just quoted, he has frequent recourse to the similes, figures, and general language of religion for the illustration of his theme. This necessity has its ground in nature; since all great intellectual, moral, and political movements have their religious implications, and the literary awakening of which the "Edinburgh " and " "Quarterly" reviews, with "Blackwood's" and the "London" magazines were the fruit was preeminently such a movement. It was either inspired on the one hand or necessitated on the other by the Revolution. The "Edinburgh" was as natural an outcome of revolutionary impulse as the "St. Bartholomew of Abuses" or the guillotine; as the "Lyrical Ballads" or the "Ode to Napoleon"; while the "Quarterly" followed as logically as Napoleon himself, or the "Letters on a Regicide Peace."

After a hundred years it seems to us as though the Revolution suffered a material sea-change in crossing the Channel. Most of its English advocates have long since found their places among the respectabilities of literature; and so far as the changes for which they contended can be called revolutionary at all, it is revolution clothed and in its right mind, revolution not only Anglicized but be-Whigged, that they represent. It did not seem so, however, to English and Scots men of letters in the first decade of the new century.

As Hazlitt put it:

"There was a mighty ferment in the heads of statesmen and poets, kings and people. According to the prevailing notion, all was to be natural and new. Nothing that was established was to be tolerated.... Kings and queens were dethroned from their rank and station in legitimate tragedy and epic poetry, as they were decapitated elsewhere. .. The world was to be turned topsy-turvy; and poetry, by the good-will of our Adam-wits, was to share its fate and begin de novo."

This represents, however, the impending change which a radical like Godwin might have hoped for, or a reactionary like Gifford feared, rather than the actual state of the case. A new poetry had indeed arisen with Wordsworth and Coleridge, to which Byron and Shelley had imparted a distinctly revolutionary character. It was natural, therefore, that a new criticism should arise, not merely of literature, but of life in its social and political aspects; and equally natural that this criticism should divide itself into two camps, one forward-looking and hopeful, the other reactionary and doubtful.

The "Edinburgh" and " Quarterly" reviews, dating their origin from 1802 and 1809 respectively, stand as the protagonists of these two forces. Late in the next decade they were followed by two monthly magazines, one of which, "Blackwood's," has for ninety years maintained a great conservative The English Poets, Lecture VIII.

reputation with brilliant success; while the other, known as the "London Magazine," lived a life so brief and chequered as scarcely to justify mention in company with its three contemporaries, were it not for the significance of the so-called "Cockney School" of writers, whose organ it practically became. Among the first Edinburgh Reviewers whom the world cares to remember were Horner, Jeffrey, Brougham, and Sydney Smith, of whom I take the last to be, upon the whole, the most significant and characteristic figure for our present purpose. The "Quarterly" numbered Gifford, Southey, Scott, and Lockhart among its early contributors, and two of them among its editors. Preeminent in the "Blackwood's" group were Lockhart, Wilson, and Maginn. The "London" could, for at least a brief period, look to a company of writers which comprised Lamb, De Quincey, Leigh Hunt,' Hood, and Hazlitt.

I am not disposed to assume the judgement-seat and to divide these men into groups of believers and unbelievers. It would be "to consider too curiously to consider so"; yet critics were not wanting in their own day to undertake the task. They of course saw in the "Quarterly" the recognized and confessed champion of a high Tory faith in Church and State as then established. Each number of the Review as it issued from the press was like incense

1 I do not know that Leigh Hunt was himself a contributor; but he was in close association with those who were.

in the nostrils of the great god, Status Quo. The "Edinburgh" was the organ, not of revolution, as its "Quarterly" rivals would have it, but of the new Liberalism, which represented in some degree the effect of revolution upon independent and courageous, but none the less eminently conservative, British minds. In both politics and religion, the blue and buff of the "Edinburgh" stood for orthodoxy, but it was the Whig orthodoxy of reason rather than the Tory orthodoxy of tradition. "Blackwood's," which did not appear until the immediate stress of the great French wars was over, ranged itself on the Conservative side; but, as became a monthly magazine whose purpose was to amuse and instruct rather than to argue, defend, or convert, it exercised its partisanship after a somewhat tricksy and irresponsible fashion. The "London Magazine" as a periodical publication would, as I have intimated, have no especial claim upon our attention; but the Cockney School, which it may be said to represent, had some right to the name of radical. Hunt and Hazlitt held admittedly unorthodox opinions, while Lamb and De Quincey, though the latter aspired to be a defender of the current religious faith, were literary innovators.

Yet the reader who blows the dust from the tops of these early volumes and runs his eye over their pages finds himself wondering how they could have made so great a stir. Their politics are sufficiently various, but their references to religion are in gen