REVIEWS AMERICAN REPRINTS. 137 



The Edinburgh Review. No. CCXVII. January, 1858. American 

 Edition : Leonard Scott & Co., New York. 



The London Quarterhj Review. No. CCV. January, 1858. Ameri- 

 can Edition : Leonard Scott & Co., New York. 



The Westminster Review. No. CXXXV. January, 1858. American 

 Edition; Leonard Scott & Co., New York. 



The North British Review. No. LTV. November, 1857. American 

 Edition : Leonard Scott & Co., New York. 



The review of a Review is a species of critical sharp shooting, only 

 recognisable in the Republic of letters under very special circumstances, 

 such as we do not claim to exist in the present case. It is not, there- 

 fore, our intention to criticise the Edinburgh Review ; to analyse the 

 modern phases of English conservatism as exhibited in the London 

 Quarterly ; to sit in judgment on the heterodoxies of the Westminster ; 

 or even to discuss the accuracy of what Messrs. Leonard Scott & Co., 

 of New York, deem it " proper to say" relative to their younger 

 northern rival : " that the ' North British,' which had recently become 

 less evangelical than in its earlier years, has got back to '\i% first faith, 

 and is now conducted on the same principles and with the same vigor 

 which characterized it when under the care of Chalmers and his illus- 

 trious compeers." 



"What we propose to notice at present is the existence and circulation 

 of these American editions of the English literary and political Re- 

 views. The politics of our English party organs appear, indeed, to 

 puzzle their American editors, nearly as much as our home editors are 

 put about to supply the precise English equivalents for such transatlan- 

 tic party names as Dough-faces, Hard-shells, Clear-Grits, Know-nothings 

 and a thousand other ingenious political figures of speech. After 

 painful analysis, however, the American reeditor eliminates the follow- 

 ing nice shades of distinction in the periodicals which, as their New 

 York publishers' advertisement states, "represent the great political 

 parties of Great Britain." "London Quarterly: Conservative^ 

 Edinburgh Revievv^ : Whig. North British : Free Church. 

 Westminster : Liberal. Blackwood : Tory," or the " embodied 

 genius of Toryism.'' Unfortunately the precision of such definitions 

 is somewhat marred by the geographical influences which affect the 

 significance of sundry of our most familiar designations. Orthodoxy 

 does not diifer more widely in its significance at London, Rome, and 

 Mecca, than the "Whiggery of English anti-conservatives does from 



