Note 10 — THE LONGMAN FAMILY. CLASSICAL AND EDUCATIONAL LITERATURE.

As we shall have no other opportunity of referring to the third in rank of the leading quarterlies, we must, perforce, compress its history in a foot-note. The Westminster Review was started more than fifty years ago, by Jeremy Bentham, who was succeeded in editorship by Sir John Browning, in conjunction with General Perronet Thompson, whose labours in the cause of radical reform gave him considerable notoriety at the time. They made way for the accomplished statesman Sir William Molesworth, the editor of Hobbes. A profounder thinker still, Mr. John Stuart Mill, followed. Most of his philosophical essays appeared in its pages, at a time when Grote and Mr. Carlyle were both contributing. For more than twenty years now the Review has been in the hands of Dr. Chapman, who, beginning life as a bookseller in Newgate Street, was the first English publisher to recognise the value of Emerson’s writings. Under Dr. Chapman, what is now the great feature—the Quarterly Summary of Contemporary Literature—was introduced. The Review has lately attracted much attention by the bold manner in which the “Social Evil” and the “Contagious Diseases Acts” have been discussed in its columns, and these articles are generally attributed to the able pen of the editor himself.