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 to the interests of both morals and letters. Not that the new Review was conducted with more fairness, or, in this sense, principle, than its antagonist. A remark of Scott's own, in a letter to Ellis, shows with how much principle, "I have run up an attempt on 'The Curse of Kehama' for the Quarterly, It affords cruel openings to the quizzers, and I suppose will get it roundly in the Edinburgh Review. I would have made a very different hand of it, indeed, had the order of the day been pour déchirer." But, although the fate of the individual was thus, to a certain extent, a matter of caprice, or, rather, prejudgment in the critic, yet the great abstract questions in morals, politics, and literature, by being discussed on both sides, were presented in a fuller, and, of course, fairer light to the public, Another beneficial result to letters was— and we shall gain credit, at least, for candour in confessing it—that it broke down somewhat of that divinity which hedged in the despotic we of the reviewer, so long as no rival arose to contest the sceptre. The claims to infallibility, so long and slavishly acquiesced in, fell to the ground when thus stoutly asserted by conflicting parties. It was pretty clear that the same thing could not be all black and all white at the same time. In short, it was the old story of pope and anti-pope; and the public began to find out that there might be hopes for the salvation of an author, though damned by the literary popedom. Time, by reversing many of its decisions, must at length have shown the same thing.