ABSTRACT
The reviewers for BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE completed the transition from the gentlemanly even-handedness of Ralph Griffiths’ Monthly Review and the Critical Review to open character assassination that had been begun by Croker and John Taylor Coleridge in the Quarterly and by Hunt and Hazlitt in the Examiner. Murray, Gifford, and Southey — whatever their political passions — had always exercised some restraint on the Quarterly’s tone, and Jeffrey’s dullness as a literary critic was matched by his sense of honor as a human being. But the rancor of the political struggles that racked Britain after Waterloo prompted younger journalists to adopt the tone of William Cobbett — personal, assertive, dogmatic, even bigotted. And when the restraining decorum of the more genteel and tolerant older generation was removed, the paper wars that had plagued the daily and weekly political press broke out into the monthly and the new weekly literary magazines and reviews.
