Jeffrey, FRANCIS, LORD, a Scottish judge, politician, and literary critic, was the son of a deputy-clerk in the Court of Session, and was born at Edinburgh, 23d October 1773. After preliminary education at the High School there, with Scott and Brougham as schoolfellows, he spent two sessions at the university of Glasgow, and one at Oxford. In 1794 he was called to the Scottish bar, but, having adopted Whig politics at a time when Whig opinions were not favourable to professional advancement, he made little progress for many years; indeed for long his income did not exceed £100 per annum. He was early famed for the keenness and alacrity of his intellect and for his literary tastes. In after years, when his practice increased, he was, although not an orator, remarkably successful in jury-trials. In the trials for sedition between 1817 and 1822 he acquired his greatest reputation at the bar. In 1820 and again in 1823 he was elected Lord Rector of the university of Glasgow on account of the great literary distinction he had then attained as editor of the Edinburgh Review. In 1829 he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Advocates; in 1830 he entered parliament as member for Perth, and on the formation of Earl Grey's ministry was nominated Lord Advocate for Scotland. After the passing of the Reform Bill, with which he had much to do, especially in the measures relating to Scotland, he was returned for the city of Edinburgh, which he continued to represent until 1834, when, tired of politics, he accepted from Lord Melbourne the dignity of a lord of the Court of Session. As a judge he was noted for his carefulness and ability. From 1815 he lived at Craigcrook, where he died, 26th January 1850.
It is neither as lawyer, judge, nor politician that Jeffrey has secured his chief title to fame. It is as a literary critic and as leader in a new departure in literary enterprise. It was he who, along with Sydney Smith, Francis Horner, and a few others, established the Edinburgh Review (q.v.). The first proposer of the scheme is supposed to have been Sydney Smith, who was the nominal editor of the first three numbers, in 1802. After that, however, Jeffrey was appointed editor at a fixed salary of £50 per number, down to 1809, and then of £200 per number down to 1829, when he resigned. His own contributions were very numerous, especially at first, and were among the most brilliant and attractive of the papers. He himself appraised as his most valuable work a Treatise on Beauty, which nobody now reads. His style was easy and fluent, but diffuse and at times careless. He was exceedingly well informed on a great variety of topics, but not profound. He had a fine imagination, a satirical turn, and a quickness of perception which instantly detected errors in manner or offences against taste. He had the critical faculty without being a critic in the highest sense, for he devoted himself more to analysis of method than of matter and thought. His defect as a critic was strikingly illustrated by his mistaken estimate of the Lake poets. There was always much of the partisan about him, and a robustness, not to say brutality, in his treatment of opponents, which brought him many enemies. His contributions to the Review numbered about 200, and a selection from them was published in 4 vols. in 1844. See the Life by his friend Lord Cockburn (1852), as also Macvey Napier's Correspondence (1877) and Carlyle's Reminiscences (1881).