The Edinburgh Review

The Select Society wanted to improve Scotch literature:

“The idea was that to show men at this stage of the country’s progress that the gradual advance of science would encourage them to learn in order to do honour to their country.”

The preface to the first number of the new Edinburgh Review says:

“In terms of development, North Britain is in early youth, guided and supported by the more mature strength of Britain. Her advances has been in science.”

Like the Select Society, this project was based on Scotch patriotism.

They felt that the productions of the Scotch press:

• were too much ignored by the English literary periodicals and
• received inadequate appreciation even in Scotland

Smith took a leading part in promoting the publication of a new literary magazine, the Edinburgh Review.

• Its first number appeared in July 1755.
• The second and last in January 1756.

Alexander Wedderburn was its editor.

• He afterwards became Lord High Chancellor of England and Earl of Rosslyn.

But in 1755, he only just passed as an advocate at the Scotch bar.

The contributors were:

• Robertson. He wrote eight review articles on new historical publications.
• Blair. He gave one or two indifferent notices of works in philosophy.
• Jardine. He was one of the ministers of Edinburgh. He discussed:
  • Ebenezer Erskine’s sermons,
  • a few theological pamphlets, and
  • Mrs. Cleland’s Cookery Book
• Adam Smith. He contributed to:
  • the first number a review of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, and
  • the second number a remarkable letter to the editor proposing to:
    • widen the scope of the Review, and
    • give a striking survey of the state of contemporary literature in all European countries.

Smith’s two contributions are the ablest and most important articles the Review published.

He gives a warm and most appreciative welcome to Johnson’s Dictionary.

But he thinks it would have been improved if Johnson had:

• more often censured the words not of approved use
• arranged the words into classes
• distinguished principal from subsidiary meanings, instead of simply enumerating a word’s several meanings

To illustrate what he wants, Smith himself writes two model articles:

• one on Wit and
• the other on Humour, both acute and interesting.

He counts humour to be:

• always something accidental and fitful,
• the disease of a disposition.

He considers it much inferior to wit, though it may often be more amusing.

“Wit expresses something that is more designed, concerted, regular, and artificial; humour something that is more wild, loose, extravagant, and fantastical; something which comes upon a man by fits which he can neither command nor restrain, and which is not perfectly consistent with true politeness.

Humour is often more diverting than wit.

Yet a man of wit is as much above a man of humour as a gentleman is above a buffoon; a buffoon, however, will often divert more than a gentleman.”

His second contribution was a long letter to the editor published in the appendix to the second number.

In this, Smith advocates the enlargement of the scope of the Review so as to give some account of works of importance published abroad, even though space had to be provided for the purpose by neglecting unimportant publications issued from the Scotch press.

In fact, he considers this substitution as a necessity for the continued life of the Review.

He says “you will oblige the public much more by giving them an account of such books as are worthy of their regard than by filling your paper with all the insignificant literary news of the time, of which not an article in a hundred is likely to be thought of a fortnight after the publication of the work that gave occasion to it.”

He then proceeds to a review of contemporary continental literature which he says to mean French literature at that time.

Italy had ceased to produce literature.

Germany produced only science.

A sentence or two may be quoted from his comparison between French and English literature.

Because they show that he was not, as he is sometimes accused of being, an unfair depreciator of the great writers of England and a blind admirer of those of France.

He had a very just opinion of the specific merits of each.

He says: “Imagination, genius, and invention seem to be the talents of the English. taste, judgment, propriety, and order, of the French. The old English poets, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, amidst some irregularities and extravagancies, often have a strength of imagination so vast, so gigantic and supernatural, that astonishes and confounds the reader into admiring their genius.

It makes the reader despise all criticism against their writings as mean and insignificant. In the eminent French writers, such sallies of genius are more rare.

Instead they have:

• a just arrangement,
• an exact propriety and decorum, joined to an equal and studied elegance of sentiment and diction.

This elegance never strikes the heart like those violent and momentary flashes of imagination.

Thus it never revolts the judgment by anything absurd or unnatural.

It never wearies the attention by any gross inequality in the style or want of connection in the method.

But it entertains the mind with a regular succession of agreeable, interesting, and connected objects.”

From poetry, he passes to philosophy.

He finds that the French encyclopedists:

• had left their native Cartesian system for the English system of Bacon and Newton, and
• were proving more effective expositors of that system than the English themselves.

After reviewing the Encyclopédie at length, he gives an account of the recent scientific works of= Buffon and Reaumur,

Rousseau’s famous Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind, [Pg 124]

It was then only a few months out

Smith says, Rousseau, “by the help of his style and with a little philosophical chemistry”= has made “the principles and ideas of the profligate Mandeville seem to have all the purity and simplicity of the morals of Plato, and to be only the true spirit of a republican carried a little too far.”

He gives a summary of the book. He translates a few specimen passages. He concludes “I shall only add that the dedication to the Republic of Geneva, of which M. Rousseau has the honour of being a citizen, is an agreeable, animated, and a just panegyric.”

Sir James Mackintosh republished these two numbers of the first Edinburgh Review in 1818 after the second Edinburgh Review had made the name famous.

In the Review, Smith admired the Republic of Geneva.

• He seems to have been always theoretically a republican, with his love of all rational liberty.

His pupil and lifelong friend was the Earl of Buchan.

Smith’s scheme for the improvement of the Review was never carried out, for with that number the Review itself came to a sudden and premature end.

It ended because of the theological articles by Dr. Jardine, which appear to be inoffensive. He was:

• the wily leader of the Moderate party in the Church
• the Dean of the Thistle.

He criticized the sermons of Ebenezer Erskine, the Secession leader.

• This provoked a sharp pamphlet from Erskine’s son.
• It accused the Edinburgh Review of:
  • teaching unsound theological views
  • putting the creature before the Creator by allowing the lawfulness of a lie in certain situations
  • throwing ridicule on the Bible and the Westminster Confession of Faith, and
  • having David Hume, an atheist, among them.