_The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine; or, Monthly Political and Literary Censor_ (1799-1821) played a strenuous rôle in the troublous times of the Napoleonic wars. It continued the policy of the _Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner_ (1797-98) conducted with such marked vigor by William Gifford, but it numbered among its contributors none of the brilliant men whose witty verses for the weekly paper are still read in the popular _Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin_. The _Review_ was conducted by John Richards Green, better known as John Gifford. Its articles were at times sensational in character, viciously abusing writers of known or suspected republican sentiments. From its pages could be culled a new series of "Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin" which for sheer vituperation and relentless abuse would be without a rival among such anthologies.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the principal reviews in course of publication were the _Monthly_, the _Critical_, the _British Critic_, and the _Anti-Jacobin_. The latter was preëminently vulgar in its appeal, the _Critical_ had lost its former prestige, and the other two had never risen above a level of mediocrity. There was more than a lurking suspicion that these periodicals were, to a certain extent, booksellers' organs, quite unreliable on account of the partial and biassed criticisms which they offered the dissatisfied public. The time was evidently ripe for a new departure in literary reviews--for the establishment of a trustworthy critical journal, conducted by capable editors and printing readable notices of important books. People were quite willing to have an unfortunate author assailed and flayed for their entertainment; but they did not care to be deceived by laudatory criticisms that were inspired by the publisher's name instead of the intrinsic merits of the work itself.
Such was the state of affairs when Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham and Sydney Smith launched the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1802, choosing a name that had been borne in 1755-56 by a short-lived semi-annual review. There were several significant facts associated with the new enterprise. It was the first important literary periodical to be published beyond the metropolis. It was the first review to appear quarterly--an interval that most contemporary journalists would have condemned as too long for a successful review. Moreover, it was conducted upon an entirely different principle than any previous review; by restricting its attention to the most important works of each quarter, it gave extensive critiques of only a few books in each number and thus avoided the multitude of perfunctory notices that had made previous reviews so dreary and unreadable.