The Sun.
London, England, 1868-01-22 00:00:00

THE QUARTERLIES.

The Quarterly. No. 247. John Murray.
Under the editorship of one of the ripest scholars
of our time, Dr. William Smith, the learned com-
piler of our great standard Classic Dictionaries,
The Quarterly more than merely sustains its repu-
tation. A signal evidence of which is afforded by
the circumstance that the last number (the number,
if we remember rightly, inaugurating Dr. William
Smith's induction into the Editorial Chair first
occupied by William Gifford) has, within the
quarter that has but just now run out,
passed into a Seventh Edition. An incident,
we believe, in the history of any quarterly publica-
tion, almost, if indeed it be not entirely unprece-
dented. And it is still to us a matter of uncer-
tainty whether this brilliant success of No. 246 of
the Quarterly Review is attributable to the superior
attractions of any one particular contribution among
the nine articles constituting its contents. For,
there was hardly one among those nine articles
but what had a peculiar attraction of its own—
two of them achieving, no doubt, a cer-
tain degree of celebrity, meaning the paper on
" The Talmud," and the political argument entitled,
rather daringly, "political Surrender." Neverthe-
less in the seven others making up the bulk of that
number, there was a hardly less obvious interest
for all sorts of readers, ex. gr., Royal Authorship—
French Retreat from Moscow—Trades' Unions--
Sir Henry Bulwer's Historical Characters—Science
in Schools—Portraits of Christ, and the Abyssinian
Expedition. Remembering what were the materials
of that number, we don't wonder in the least that
it has already run into a Seventh Edition. And
seeing now what are the contents of the number
here following in its wake (No. 217), we are,
for a similar reason, almost disposed to
anticipate a like success in the way of rapid
republication. It is a peculiarity of the Quarterly
—and one that we.have already frequently taken oc-
casion to comment upon—that its menu, so to speak,
is always appetising. The fare besides this is always
seasonable--what is in season in other words is
always sure to be " dished up" for us in perfection.
Flavoured often enough, too, with a sauce piquante.
.nd the chef moreover has very wisely an eye to
the piece de resistance.. Here, it is—What ? Why,
with what betterp Wee de resistance did the Quarterly
ever feast its guests, meaning its readers,
than the one discoverable here in the first article
introducing the current number to us ? That
first article being a memorial paper, biographical
rather than critical, relating to the most illustrious
among the founders, projectors, or originators of
the Quarterly Review itself—" Sir Walter Scott."
From internal evidence we are disposed to father
this paper about Sir Walter Scott upon a very dis-
tinguished contempordry. By whomsoever it may
have been written, nevertheless, in the charm of it
as a whole it is simply irresistible. We open the
number at page 1, we cut the leaves, and we read
on steadily; glibly, eagerly, to page 51 —at which,
to our poignant regret; the article termi-
nates.

There are elipses or elisions, how-
ever, in it that appear to u by the way very
unnecessary, :and that we cannot but regret as
disappointing to the last degree. For example,
when the writer comes to the mention more parti-
cularly of the Waverley Novels (it is at p. 33) we
find him contenting himself, but certainly not his
readers, with this most tantalising sentence—" How
they [that is the Waverley Novels] began and how
they forced their way into an amount of popula-
rity quite without precedent, it would be foreign to
the purpose of this sketch—[Why ?] -if we
paused to give an account." Why, that always is
and must be the paramount and central interest of
any biography of Sir Walter Scott. And to pass it
by thus casually is, as it were, to give us Hamlet
with the character of Hamlet omitted. However
—let us not be ungrateful. The paper is simply so
good that we are hungrily asking for more, and
0
find ourselves quarrelling with the host who feasts
us because he has not helped us more largely. As
a whole this paper on Sir Walter Scott is admir-
able. It is worthy of Scott, and of the Quarterly
more than which we simply could not say.
When mention is made (pp. 20 and 21) of
the first ill-advised commencement of Scott's
calamitious business entanglements with Bal-
lantyne the printer, a letter of Sir Walter's
is here quoted in which he particularises three
branches of printing then (1802) quite open, as he
conceives in Edinburgh—" The first," Sir Walter
Scott writes, "is that of an Editor of a News-
paper, which shall contain something of an uni-
form, historical, deduction of events distinct from
the farrago of detached and unconnected plagiar-
isms from the London paragraphs of The Sun."
By a curious coincidence in the very next paper in
this current number of the Quarterly Review,
that is, in Article 2, relating to " The Queen in the
Islands and Highlands," mention is again made of
this journal, only a few pages further on (p. 80)—
this time, however, not in a quotation from a letter
of Sir 'Walter Scott's in 1802, but in an extract from
the recently published diary of her Majesty the
Queen, where, under date September 16, 1852,
the Sovereign writes—" We were startled this
morning at seven o'clock by a letter from Colonel
Phipps, enclosing a telegraphic despatch with the
report, from the Sixth Edition of The Sun, of
the Duke of 'Wellington's death the day before
yesterday." Following immediately upon the
Quarter/is loyal tribute to the Queen's Journal, we
have here a curious paper enough on Auricular
Confession as practised in the Church of England,
a review of M. Guizot's Memoirs, a comprehensive
paper on " The British Museum," and a re-
markable anecdotal chapter on " Longevity and
Centenarianism." Articles on Phoenicia and Greece,
on Church Progress (so called), and on England's
now imminent Irish Difficulty, complete the num-
ber—the last-mentioned contribution being the Poli-
tical, the sufficiently apropos Political of the Quar-
terly for this present January.

The Edinburgh. No. 259. Longman and Co.
To our thinking the most interesting among all
the nine articles making up the current number of
the. Edinburgh is the one relating to the Messrs.
Parkes and Merivale's recently published memoirs
of Sir Philip Francis—or, otherwise, we are half
disposed, to say, of Junius ! For of Junius
we, at any rate, don't hesitate to say,
Aut Francis aut Diabolus ! The Letters of
Junius being intensely and essentially Philipics, or,
let us put it more plainly still, Sir Philipics To
forty-one others the credit (and discredit also it
must be said) of being Junius has at different
times been imputed.- But upon Francis alone
the cap fits_ to perfection. He it was Burke
spoke of as the " Prince of Pamphleteers." 110
it was who answered (as Junius might
have answered) a friend's preliminary to the in"
inquiry, " Sir Philip [by an absurd misprint it is
here put, very Frenchly indeed in the Edin-
bui yh, page 202 Sir Francis] give me
leave to ask one question"—" At your Peril,
Sir 1" He it was of whom another ball ;c1
interrogator exclaimed (as he might alone have
exclaimed of Junius) " I don't know whether he is
Junius, but I am sure that he is Brutus 1" He it was
whose handwriting bore such a subtle and intimate
resemblance to the handwriting of Junius that the
&c., always has in each an a placed over it—that
the i's are in each not dotted but dashed
with an oblique stroke—that the Y of You and
Yours is in each always a capital. 1-15
it is whose presence in London or absenee froal
Lyndon, always corresponds with the appearance or
non-appearance of letters from Junius in the Public
A duertiser! Whose departure for India 1°
marked by the sudden and final cessation of
any correspondence at all from Junius ! And whoe
return to England from India several years after is
immediately followed by the publication of the firs
collective issue of those "Letters of Junius" as 5
separate publication. " The Queen's Highland
Journal" is of course reviewed in the Edinburgh as
.
well as in the Quarterly, and, equally of course, 13°'
one jot less loyally. The paper on " Oysters" svovnld,
have set Dando's mouth watering. " Two - "
Cent." is the suggestive title of a paper upon
- Commercial, Monetary, Financial stagnation, de.)
lock, collapse, or however it may be termed, which
has followed the last icarful Panic. Tho othei.