The Express.
London, England, 1850-01-29 00:00:00

LORD JEFFREY.

(From the D tily News.) "
Napoleon's marshals hard one by one disappeared
from the great scene of their reward and renown.
Whilst France was great in achievement' of war,
England, not backward in them, was still greater in
efforts of mind. And our military commanders
yield to no foreign contemporary. But the thinkers
and advancers of English intellect, from the cultiva-
tion of poetry to that of political tcmomy, from the
study and illustration of the h. art and of life to that of
public affairs and political science, stand unrivalled.
No one amongst them can take precedence of
FRANCIS JEFFREY. And yet who was he? TLe
founder of a periodical, the great dealer in anonymous
criticism, the framer of a liberal, and therefore an at
first loudly decried party. Two of our eminent
authors hare been lately disputing about the respec-
tability and dew of penmen. Let them contem-
plate the career of JEFFREY, and see what a good
goose-quill can do, when it has got an idea to animate,
discretion to guide, and a will to keep it steady.
And be it noted, with reference to this same dispute,
that the reputation of JEFFREY or of any other man
is not prorrtioned so much to what he wrote, but to
what he did, not to his superior talents, but to the
as be made of them. He is a great man not became
of his wit shown in any one article, or before any
given company, but because JEFFREY has a real alio
sensible idluence upon his age; and that wirlding
knowledge and power, he made that power be felt
and be fruitful.

JEFFREY wu the origin and the leading spirit
of a great revolution, not the less a revolution
for being an unseen and a slow one. At the be-
ginning of the present century, England and Englie h-
men were indued with a coat of tory pr,juaice, so
thick and so impenetrable that every liberal missile
fell blunted from each a breastplate. There could
have been little difference then between the poli-
tical temperature of London and that of St.
Petersburgh. French excesses and successes had
rendered them so odious and so formidable, that
every liberal idea was scouted, because inevitably
tinctured with Gallicanism. Fox and his friends
committed fault after fault, the result of headlong and
generous feeling. But each year disproved their
predictions, and every event belied their phi-
losophy. The current towards toryism, nay, towards
absolutism, was so strong, that dulness floated
triumphant on it, and kept the lead without effort.
la an age worthy of the Dwwiad, " all the talents"
were at a lamentable discount.

It was then that in a remote and distant capital,
where toryism also had its hereditary spread and far-
roots, certain spirits communed and clubbed together,
to begin what we should now call an agitation. But
it was an agitation, which began with the
gentlest stir, a quiet ventilation of ideas,
that had been lying dusty and in rep me.
A periodical was started as the organ. Young and
undeveloped intellects poured into it though at first
small in experience and power. But the very exer-
cise ot thinking and writing for the pubic soon
swelled their power, improved their minds, and the
Edinburgh Renew, what* began with the voice ot
a child, filled the empire with its manly tone, its
searching and thought riming inquiries, its univer-
sally-exciting interest. It sought every student
in his closet, every intellect in its lair, whether
the poet, the philosopher, or the politician :
and the mule or the jenny was not a more won-
derful development of the power of spinning wool,
than the new periodical engine became for spinning
thought.
The history of the Edinburgh Renew is that of a
long crust de, gaining annual victories, and advancing
step by step, now and then indeed suffering a check
on points where it was not prepared--as,for example,
in the corn law of 1815, but nevertheless taking
greater and greater hold of public opinion, till at
last whiggism was re-instated, and was enabled by
taking lib .cal ideas at the flood in 1830 to carry out
our reform and their own ascendancy.
There, indeed, ended the crusade. The whigs from
a popular became a governmental party; whilst the
great task of agitating and informing the public
mind passed to younger parties, to other schools, and
to other classes. Into any recount of these we need
not stretch, for the active influence of JEFFREY
scarcely extended beyond 18.30, although we do but to-
day record the close of his mortal career.
Other pens are better fitted to do justice to the lite-
rary genius and personal excellence of JEFFREY. As
a literary, or even as a political writer, we s ould
scarcely have undertaken to write his epitaph or
swell the announcement of his decease into an essay.
It is as the innoviecie, the awakener, the founder of
a school of philosophic and argumentative
agitation, that JEFFREY commands our atmn-
tion and draws forth a tribute of gratitude.
His was a happy, a well-filled, and successful life.
Foremost amongst foremost spirits, well fitted to be
the first, and to take the lead amongst them, he showed
them the way through brilliant triumphs to final victory.
Nor is it lees conducive to his fame to say that his aim,
when completed, died with him; and that tne great
ideas of political and commercial freedom, so well and
wisely nursed, and tended in a narrow circle for a cer-
tain time, must henceforth be entrusted, not to a coterie,
but to the open and enlightened classes of the popula-
tion. Toryism is defunct, and has been dissolved to other
elements. It is time that whiggism should, with
equal grace, submit to a similar fate. It is time that
it should abandon the vain endeavour to preserve in a
narrow circle of the whig-born, whig-connected, and
whig-ordered, that asceudanoy which was won by
6,
popular intellects in the popular field.