"Cockney School" embody a literary mistake as grievous as was ever committed. "I propose," says the contemptuous critic, addressing Leigh Hunt by name, "to relieve my main attack upon you by a diversion against some of your younger and less-important auxiliaries-the Keatses, the Shelleys, and the Webbes." For a maga zine which shortly afterwards treated with judicial dignity the shortcomings and blunders of Jeffrey, this slip was terrible enough. In after days, however, Wilson's delicate and enthusiastic criticism did much to gain for Wordsworth the popular appreciation which was so slow to come. WILLIAM GIFFORD, born 1756; died 1826. The Mæviad, 1795. Edited The Anti-Jacobin, 1797-98. Quarterly Review, 1808 to 1824. GEORGE CANNING, born 1770; died 1827. JOHN HOOKHAM FRERE, born 1769; died 1846. Published Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin. Whistlecraft (Prospectus and Specimen of our intended National work), 1817. Metrical Translation of the "Birds " and "Acharnians " of Aristophanes. FRANCIS JEFFREY, born 1773; died 1850. Editor of the Edinburgh Review from 1803 to 1829, in which innumerable critical articles were published; afterwards collected in four vols., 1824. SYDNEY SMITH, born 1771; died 1845. Published Contributions to Edinburgh Review, from 1802. Peter Plymley's Letters, 1807. HENRY BROUGHAM, born 1778; died 1868. Published Mathematical and Scientific Papers, 1796-1798. Inquiry into Colonial Policy, 1803. Discourses on Paley's Natural Theology, 1835. Memoirs of the Statesmen of the Reign of George III., 1839-1843. Lives of Men of Letters and Science, 1840. Political Philosophy, 1840. Analytical View of Newton's Principia, 1855. His own Life and Times (incomplete), 1871. JOHN WILSON, born 1785; died 1854. Published Isle of Palms, 1812. City of the Plague, 1816. Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life, 1822. (Several of these were originally published in Black wood's Magazine.) The Trials of Margaret Lyndsay, 1823. The Foresters, 1824. The Recreations of Christopher North, 1842. He was the chief contributor to (though never editor of) Blackwood's Magazine, from 1817 almost to the end of his life. JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART, born 1794; died 1854. Published Valerius: A Roman Story, 1821. Adam Blair, 1822. Life of Scott, 1837-38. He contributed to Blackwood's Magazine from its beginning, and became editor of the Quarterly Review in 1824. JAMES HOGG, the Ettrick Shepherd, born 1770; died 1835. Published Poems (chiefly songs), 1801. The Mountain Bard, 1807. The Queen's Wake, 1813. Also a great number of short poems and tales at various dates. CHAPTER IIL WALTER SCOTT. WHILE the young men of the Edinburgh Review were setting out upon their bold enterprise from the neglected side of the Parliament House, and avenging their Whiggery, oddly enough, not upon its opponents, but upon the poets of their own party, another young advocate in Edinburgh belonging to the other side was slowly becoming known among his peers as possessing abilities beyond the common level, though no such brilliancy as that which flashed out, in sight of all the world, in the great Review. Walter Scott was the son of an Edinburgh Writer to the Signet, a respectable Scotch lawyer—with a traceable descent from the Scotts of Harden, and all the advantage of known and honourable connections s; but he was no better off than his contemporaries, except in so far that he had a fair prospect of the rewards and encouragements then exclusively appropriated by his party in politics. He had been brought up, like all the rest, at the High School, after a dreamy and delightful childhood, chiefly spent in the country, where unconsciously he must have taken into his heart that world of rural life, with all its sights and sounds, the ewe-milkers, the farm labourers, the peasant race which no one has ever understood more completely; and at the same time all the traditions and ballads that floated about the countryside a lore as then neither prized nor chronicled, but dear to every fresh youthful spirit, and doubly dear to the boy whose ancestors had figured in the stirring dramas of the Border, and whose life was to be influenced throughout by their inspiration. Permitted as a child, by a partially invalid condition, the privilege of constant reading, he had called himself a "virtuoso" at a very early age, and claimed kindred with other readers and thinkers, to the great amusement of his family. At school, however, not even his lameness kept him back from a vigorous share in all the sports and frays of his comrades; and though the poetical side of his character was visible in many an hour of youthful leisure, it was not of a kind to obtrude itself upon the general eye. It revealed itself in summer holidays, when he would climb, with a cherished friend and a book, high up among the cliffs of Arthur's Seat, and there, seated in a mossy corner, read the long evening through, while the light of the northern day lingered over the wide landscape. "He read faster than I," says the companion of these silent hours, "and had on this account to wait a little at finishing every two pages before turning the leaf." What thoughts must have been in the young reader's mind as he "waited a little" while his slower comrade plodded on—and lifting his young eyes with all the light of genius in them, looked abroad, still with the fumes of the poetry in his head, over that wonderful landscape, the most picturesque of cities at his feet, the soft steeps of St. Leonard's close at hand, and far away the blue distant Firth with its islands, and the low hills of Fife.. "Where's the coward that would not dare these very words, one can imagine, must have been in his mind as he lay on the grass, with all the confused VOL. II. G |