to the mind of any one who is concerned in the control of a Review, and a volume has just been printed which sets such musings once more astir.  Mr. Macvey Napier was the editor of the Edinburgh Review from 1829—­when Jeffrey, after a reign of seven-and-twenty years, resigned it into his hands—­until his death in 1847.  A portion of the correspondence addressed to Mr. Napier during this period is full of personal interest both to the man of letters and to that more singular being, the Editor, the impresario of men of letters, the entrepreneur of the spiritual power.

To manage an opera-house is usually supposed to tax human powers more urgently than any position save that of a general in the very heat and stress of battle.  The orchestra, the chorus, the subscribers, the first tenor, a pair of rival prima donnas, the newspapers, the box-agents in Bond Street, the army of hangers-on in the flies—­all combine to demand such gifts of tact, resolution, patience, foresight, tenacity, flexibility, as are only expected from the great ruler or the great soldier.  The editor of a periodical of public consideration—­and the Edinburgh Review in the hands of Mr. Napier was the avowed organ of the ruling Whig powers—­is sorely tested in the same way.  The rival house may bribe his stars.  His popular epigrammatist is sometimes as full of humours as a spoiled soprano.  The favourite pyrotechnist is systematically late and procrastinatory, or is piqued because his punctuation or his paragraphs have been meddled with.  The contributor whose article would be in excellent time if it did not appear before the close of the century, or never appeared at all, pesters you with warnings that a month’s delay is a deadly blow to progress, and stays the great procession of the ages.  The contributor who could profitably fill a sheet, insists on sending a treatise.  Sir George Cornewall Lewis, who had charge of the Edinburgh for a short space, truly described prolixity as the bete noire of an editor.  “Every contributor,” he said, “has some special reason for wishing to write at length on his own subject.”

Ah, que de choses dans un menuet! cried Marcel, the great dancing-master, and ah, what things in the type and [Greek:  idea] of an article, cries an editor with the enthusiasm of his calling; such proportion, measure, comprehension, variety of topics, pithiness of treatment, all within a space appointed with Procrustean rigour.  This is what the soul of the volunteer contributor is dull to.  Of the minor vexations who can tell?  There is one single tribulation dire enough to poison life—­even if there were no other—­and this is disorderly manuscript.  Empson, Mr. Napier’s well-known contributor, was one of the worst offenders; he would never even take the trouble to mark his paragraphs.  It is my misfortune to have a manuscript before me at this moment that would fill thirty of these pages, and yet from beginning to end there is no indication that