Part 5

If from these causes the necessity for dead-houses is so great when no inquest is necessary, how much stronger is it when the services of the coroner are requisite? The reason given for the peripatetic nature of the office, is the assumed necessity of the jury seeing the bodies on the spot and in the circumstances of death. But that such a necessity is unreal was proved on the inquest we have been detailing, by the fact of the remains having been lifted from the bed where life ceased, to a table, and having been opened by the surgeons. Surely, removal to a wholesome and convenient reception-house, would not disturb such appearances as may be presumed to form evidence. As it is, the only place among the poor in which medical men can perform the important duty of examination by _post mortem_ dissection is a room crowded with inmates—or the tap-room of the nearest tavern.

To preserve, then, a degree of order, dignity, and solemnity equal at least to that which is maintained to try an action for debt, and to prevent the possibility of any ‘private’ dealings, we would strongly urge that a suitable Coroner’s Court-house be attached to each of the proposed reception-houses. A clause to this effect can be easily introduced into the new bill. With such accommodation the coroner could perform his office in a manner worthy of a delegate of the Crown, and no such informalities as tend to intercept and taint the pure stream of Justice could continue to exist.

FRANCIS JEFFREY.

JEFFREY was a year younger than SCOTT, whom he outlived eighteen years, and with whose career his own had some points of resemblance. They came of the same middle-class stock, and had played together as lads in the High School ‘yard’ before they met as advocates in the Court of Session. The fathers of both were connected with that Court; and from childhood, both were devoted to the law. But Scott’s boyish infirmity imprisoned him in Edinburgh, while Jeffrey was let loose to Glasgow University, and afterwards passed up to Queen’s College, Oxford. The boys, thus separated, had no remembrance of having previously met, when they saw each other at the Speculative Society in 1791.

The Oxford of that day suited Jeffrey ill. It suited few people well who cared for anything but cards and claret. Southey, who came just after him, tells us that the Greek he took there he left there, nor ever passed such unprofitable months; and Lord Malmesbury, who had been there but a little time before him, wonders how it was that so many men should make their way in the world creditably, after leaving a place that taught nothing but idleness and drunkenness. But Jeffrey was not long exposed to its temptations. He left after the brief residence of a single term; and what in after life he remembered most vividly in connection with it, seems to have been the twelve days’ hard travelling between Edinburgh and London which preceded his entrance at Queen’s. Some seventy years before, another Scotch lad, on his way to become yet more famous in literature and law, had taken nearly as many weeks to perform the same journey; but, between the schooldays of Mansfield and of Jeffrey, the world had not been resting.

It was enacting its greatest modern incident, the first French Revolution, when the young Scotch student returned to Edinburgh and changed his College gown for that of the advocate. Scott had the start of him in the Court of Session by two years, and had become rather active and distinguished in the Speculative Society before Jeffrey joined it. When the latter, then a lad of nineteen, was introduced, (one evening in 1791), he observed a heavy-looking young man officiating as secretary, who sat solemnly at the bottom of the table in a huge woollen night-cap, and who, before the business of the night began, rose from his chair, and, with imperturbable gravity seated on as much of his face as was discernible from the wrappings of the ‘portentous machine’ that enveloped it, apologised for having left home with a bad toothache. This was his quondam schoolfellow Scott. Perhaps Jeffrey was pleased with the mingled enthusiasm for the speculative, and regard for the practical, implied in the woollen night-cap; or perhaps he was interested by the Essay on Ballads which the hero of the night-cap read in the course of the evening: but before he left the meeting he sought an introduction to Mr. Walter Scott, and they were very intimate for many years afterwards.

The Speculative Society dealt with the usual subjects of elocution and debate prevalent in similar places then and since; such as, whether there ought to be an Established Religion, and whether the Execution of Charles I. was justifiable, and if Ossian’s poems were authentic? It was not a fraternity of speculators by any means of an alarming or dangerous sort. John Allen and his friends, at this very time, were spouting forth active sympathy for French Republicanism at Fortune’s Tavern, under immediate and watchful superintendence of the Police; James Macintosh was parading the streets with Horne Tooke’s colours in his hat; James Montgomery was expiating in York Jail his exulting ballad on the Fall of the Bastille; and Southey and Coleridge, in despair of old England, had completed the arrangements of their youthful colony for a community of property, and proscription of everything selfish, on the banks of the Susquehana;—but the Speculative orators rarely probed the sores of the body politic deeper than an inquiry into the practical advantages of belief in a future state? and whether it was for the interest of Britain to maintain the balance of Europe? or if knowledge could be too much disseminated among the lower ranks of the people?

In short, nothing of the extravagance of the time, on either side, is associable with the outset of Jeffrey’s career. As little does he seem to have been influenced, on the one hand, by the democratic foray of some two hundred convention delegates into Edinburgh in 1792, as, on the other, by the prominence of his father’s name to a protest of frantic high-tory defiance; and he was justified not many years since in referring with pride to the fact that, at the opening of his public life, his view of the character of the first French revolution, and of its probable influence on other countries, had been such as to require little modification during the whole of his subsequent career. The precision and accuracy of his judgment had begun to show itself thus early. At the crude young Jacobins, so soon to ripen into Quarterly Reviewers, who were just now coquetting with Mary Woolstonecraft, or making love to the ghost of Madame Roland, or branding as worthy of the bowstring the tyrannical enormities of Mr. Pitt, he could afford to laugh from the first. From the very first he had the strongest liberal tendencies, but restrained them so wisely that he could cultivate them well.

He joined the band of youths who then sat at the feet of Dugald Stewart, and whose first incentive to distinction in the more difficult paths of knowledge, as well as their almost universal adoption of the liberal school of politics, are in some degree attributable to the teaching of that distinguished man. Among them were Brougham and Horner, who had played together from boyhood in Edinburgh streets, had joined the Speculative on the same evening six years after Jeffrey (who in Brougham soon found a sharp opponent on colonial and other matters), and were still fast friends. Jeffrey’s father, raised to a deputy clerk of session, now lived on a third or fourth flat in Buchanan’s Court in the Lawn Market, where the worthy old gentleman kept two women servants and a man at livery; but where the furniture does not seem to have been of the soundest. This fact his son used to illustrate by an anecdote of the old gentleman eagerly setting-to at a favourite dinner one day, with the two corners of the table cloth tied round his neck to protect his immense professional frills, when the leg of his chair gave way, and he tumbled back on the floor with all the dishes, sauces, and viands a-top of him. Father and son lived here together, till the latter took for his first wife the daughter of the Professor of Hebrew in the University of St. Andrew, and moved to an upper story in another part of town. He had been called to the bar in 1794, and was married eight years afterward. He had not meanwhile obtained much practice, and the elevation implied in removal to an upper flat is not of the kind that a young Benedict covets. But distinction of another kind was at length at hand.

One day early in 1802, ‘in the eighth or ninth story or flat in Buccleugh Place, the elevated residence of the then Mr. Jeffrey,’ Mr. Jeffrey had received a visit from Horner and Sydney Smith, when Sydney, at this time a young English curate temporarily resident in Edinburgh, preaching, teaching, and joking with a flow of wit, humanity, and sense that fascinated everybody, started the notion of the Edinburgh Review. The two Scotchmen at once voted the Englishman its editor, and the notion was communicated to John Archibald Murray (Lord Advocate after Jeffrey, long years afterward), John Allen (then lecturing on medical subjects at the University, but who went abroad before he could render any essential service), and Alexander Hamilton (afterwards Sanscrit professor at Haileybury). This was the first council; but it was extended, after a few days, till the two Thomsons (John and Thomas, the physician and the advocate), Thomas Brown (who succeeded to Dugald Stewart’s chair), and Henry Brougham, were admitted to the deliberations. Horner’s quondam playfellow was an ally too potent to be obtained without trouble; and, even thus early, had not a few characteristics in common with the Roman statesman and orator whom it was his greatest ambition in after life to resemble, and of whom Shakspeare has told us that he never followed anything that other men began.

‘You remember how cheerfully Brougham approved of our plan at first,’ wrote Jeffrey to Horner, in April, in the thick of anxious preparations for the start, ‘and agreed to give us an article or two without hesitation. Three or four days ago I proposed two or three books that I thought would suit him; when he answered, with perfect good humour, that he had changed his view of our plan a little, and rather thought now that he should decline to have any connection with it.’ This little coquetry was nevertheless overcome; and before the next six months were over, Brougham had become an efficient and zealous member of the band.

It is curious to see how the project hung fire at first. Jeffrey had nearly finished four articles, Horner had partly written four, and more than half the number was printed; and yet well nigh the other half had still to be written. The memorable fasciculus at last appeared in November, after a somewhat tedious gestation of nearly ten months; having been subject to what Jeffrey calls so ‘miserable a state of backwardness’ and so many ‘symptoms of despondency,’ that Constable had to delay the publication some weeks beyond the day first fixed. Yet as early as April had Sydney Smith completed more than half of what he contributed, while nobody else had put pen to paper; and shortly after the number appeared he was probably not sorry to be summoned, with his easy pen and his cheerful wit, to London, and to abandon the cares of editorship to Jeffrey.

No other choice could have been made. That first number settled the point. It is easy to discover that Jeffrey’s estimation in Edinburgh had not, up to this time, been in any just proportion to his powers; and that, even with those who knew him best, his playful and sportive fancy sparkled too much to the surface of his talk to let them see the grave deep currents that ran underneath. Every one now read with surprise the articles attributed to him. Sydney had yielded him the place of honour, and he had vindicated his right to it. He had thrown out a new and forcible style of criticism, with a fearless, unmisgiving, and unhesitating courage. Objectors might doubt or cavil at the opinions expressed; but the various and comprehensive knowledge, the subtle argumentative genius, the brilliant and definite expression, there was no disputing or denying. A fresh and startling power was about to make itself felt in literature.

‘Jeffrey,’ said his most generous fellow labourer, a few days after the Review appeared, ‘is the person who will derive most honour from this publication, as his articles in this number are generally known, and are incomparably the best; I have received the greater pleasure from this circumstance, because the genius of that little man has remained almost unknown to all but his most intimate acquaintances. His manner is not at first pleasing; what is worse, it is of that cast which almost irresistibly impresses upon strangers the idea of levity and superficial talents. Yet there is not any man, whose real character is so much the reverse; he has, indeed, a very sportive and playful fancy, but it is accompanied with an extensive and varied information, with a readiness of apprehension almost intuitive, with judicious and calm discernment, with a profound and penetrating understanding.’ This confident passage from a private journal of the 20th November, 1802, may stand as a remarkable monument of the prescience of Francis Horner.

Yet it was also the opinion of this candid and sagacious man that he and his fellows had not gained much character by that first number of the Review. As a set-off to the talents exhibited, he spoke of the severity—of what, in some of the papers, might be called the scurrility—as having given general dissatisfaction; and he predicted that they would have to soften their tone, and be more indulgent to folly and bad taste. Perhaps it is hardly thus that the objection should have been expressed. It is now, after the lapse of nearly half a century, admitted on all hands that the tone adopted by these young Edinburgh reviewers was in some respects extremely indiscreet; and that it was not simply folly and bad taste, but originality and genius, that had the right to more indulgence at their hands. When Lord Jeffrey lately collected Mr. Jeffrey’s critical articles, he silently dropped those very specimens of his power which by their boldness of view, severity of remark, and vivacity of expression, would still as of old have attracted the greatest notice; and preferred to connect with his name, in the regard of such as might hereafter take interest in his writings, only those papers which, by enforcing what appeared to him just principles and useful opinions, he hoped might have a tendency to make men happier and better. Somebody said by way of compliment of the early days of the Scotch Review, that it made reviewing more respectable than authorship; and the remark, though essentially the reverse of a compliment, exhibits with tolerable accuracy the general design of the work at its outset. Its ardent young reviewers took a somewhat too ambitious stand above the literature they criticised. ‘To all of us,’ Horner ingenuously confessed, ‘it is only matter of temporary amusement and subordinate occupation.’

Something of the same notion was in Scott’s thoughts when, smarting from a severe but not unjust or ungenerous review of Marmion, he said that Jeffrey loved to see imagination best when it is bitted and managed, and ridden upon the _grand pas_. He did not make sufficient allowance for starts and sallies and bounds, when Pegasus was beautiful to behold, though sometimes perilous to his rider. He would have had control of horse as well as rider, Scott complained, and made himself master of the ménage to both. But on the other hand this was often very possible; and nothing could then be conceived more charming than the earnest, playful, delightful way in which his comments adorned and enriched the poets he admired. Hogarth is not happier in Charles Lamb’s company, than is the homely vigour and genius of Crabbe under Jeffrey’s friendly leading; he returned fancy for fancy to Moore’s exuberance, and sparkled with a wit as keen; he ‘tamed his wild heart’ to the loving thoughtfulness of Rogers, his scholarly enthusiasm, his pure and vivid pictures; with the fiery energy and passionate exuberance of Byron, his bright courageous spirit broke into earnest sympathy; for the clear and stirring strains of Campbell he had an ever lively and liberal response; and Scott, in the midst of many temptations to the exercise of severity, never ceased to awaken the romance and generosity of his nature.

His own idea of the more grave critical claims put forth by him in his early days, found expression in later life. He had constantly endeavoured, he said, to combine ethical precepts with literary criticism. He had earnestly sought to impress his readers with a sense, both of the close connection between sound intellectual attainments, and the higher elements of duty and enjoyment; and of the just and ultimate subordination of the former to the latter. Nor without good reason did he take this praise to himself. The taste which Dugald Stewart had implanted in him, governed him more than any other at the outset of his career; and may often have contributed not a little, though quite unconsciously, to lift the aspiring young metaphysician somewhat too ambitiously above the level of the luckless author summoned to his judgment seat. Before the third year of the review had opened, he had broken a spear in the lists of metaphysical philosophy even with his old tutor, and with Jeremy Bentham, both in the maturity of their fame; he had assailed, with equal gallantry, the opposite errors of Priestley and Reid; and, not many years later, he invited his friend Alison to a friendly contest, from which the fancies of that amiable man came out dulled by a superior brightness, by more lively, varied, and animated conceptions of beauty, and by a style which recommended a more than Scotch soberness of doctrine with a more than French vivacity of expression.

For it is to be said of Jeffrey, that when he opposed himself to enthusiasm, he did so in the spirit of an enthusiast; and that this had a tendency to correct such critical mistakes as he may occasionally have committed. And as of him, so of his Review. In professing to go deeply into the _principles_ on which its judgments were to be rested, as well as to take large and original views of all the important questions to which those works might relate,—it substantially succeeded, as Jeffrey presumed to think it had done, in familiarising the public mind with higher speculations, and sounder and larger views of the great objects of human pursuit; as well as in permanently raising the standard, and increasing the influence, of all such occasional writings far beyond the limits of Great Britain.

Nor let it be forgotten that the system on which Jeffrey established relations between his writers and publishers has been of the highest value as a precedent in such matters, and has protected the independence and dignity of a later race of reviewers. He would never receive an unpaid-for contribution. He declined to make it the interest of the proprietors to prefer a certain class of contributors. The payment was ten guineas a sheet at first, and rose gradually to double that sum, with increase on special occasions; and even when rank or other circumstances made remuneration a matter of perfect indifference, Jeffrey insisted that it should nevertheless be received. The Czar Peter, when working in the trenches, he was wont to say, received pay as a common soldier. Another principle which he rigidly carried out, was that of a thorough independence of publishing interests. The Edinburgh Review was never made in any manner tributary to particular bookselling schemes. It assailed or supported with equal vehemence or heartiness the productions of Albemarle-street and Paternoster-row. ‘I never asked such a thing of him but once,’ said the late Mr. Constable, describing an attempt to obtain a favourable notice from his obdurate Editor, ‘and I assure you the result was no encouragement to repeat such petitions.’ The book was Scott’s edition of Swift; and the result one of the bitterest attacks on the popularity of Swift, in one of Jeffrey’s most masterly criticisms.

He was the better able thus to carry his point, because against more potent influences he had already taken a decisive stand. It was not till six years after the Review was started that Scott remonstrated with Jeffrey on the virulence of its party politics. But much earlier even than this, the principal proprietors had made the same complaint; had pushed their objections to the contemplation of Jeffrey’s surrender of the editorship; and had opened negotiations with writers known to be bitterly opposed to him. To his honour, Southey declined these overtures, and advised a compromise of the dispute. Some of the leading Whigs themselves were discontented, and Horner had appealed to him from the library of Holland House. Nevertheless, Jeffrey stood firm. He carried the day against Paternoster-row, and unassailably established the all-important principle of a perfect independence of his publishers’ control. He stood as resolute against his friend Scott; protesting that on one leg, and the weakest, the Review could not and should not stand, for that its _right leg_ he knew to be politics. To Horner he replied by carrying the war into the Holland House country with inimitable spirit and cogency. ‘Do, for Heaven’s sake, let your Whigs do something popular and effective this session. Don’t you see the nation is now divided into two, and only two parties; and that _between_ these stand the Whigs, utterly inefficient, and incapable of ever becoming efficient, if they will still maintain themselves at an equal distance from both. You must lay aside a great part of your aristocratic feelings, and side with the most respectable and sane of the democrats.’