GIFFORD, WILLIAM

born April 1756, Ashburton, Devonshire, Eng. died Dec. 31, 1826, London English satirical poet, classical scholar, and early editor of 17th-century English playwrights, remembered as first editor (180924) of The Quarterly Review, founded by John Murray, a leading London publisher, to combat the liberalism of The Edinburgh Review. Gifford owed his editorship to Sir Walter Scott's refusal of it, to Murray's regard for his judgment, and to his connection with the statesman George Canning on The Anti-Jacobin (179798), a weekly of which he had been editor and in which Canning and other Tories had ridiculed revolutionary principles. Gifford, a self-important, small-minded man raised to a power to which his talents were unequal, offended eminent contributors by rewriting their literary reviews to introduce political abuse, so provoking William Hazlitt, a leading radical critic, to attack him in A Letter to William Gifford, Esq. (1819) and to immortalize him in a portrait etched in vitriol in The Spirit of the Age (1825). Gifford's autobiography (1802) helps to explain his character. Orphaned at 11 and put to uncongenial work, he owed his education at Oxford University to patronage. In The Baviad (1791) and The Maeviad (1795), verse satires attacking the Della Cruscans, a group of minor English writers of the 1780s who took their name from the Italian Accademia della Crusca, he shows his resentment of those to whom entry to the world of letters, so difficult for him, had been undeservedly easy.