John Barrow (1764–1848), traveller, author, colonial administrator, influential member of the Royal Society, co-founder of the Royal Geographical Society and Second Secretary to the Admiralty for forty years, was a major contributor to the Quarterly Review, writing more than two hundred articles between 1809 and 1841, three quarters of them while Gifford and Coleridge were editors. In a widely repeated anecdote written one year before his death, Barrow attributed his involvement to an invitation from George Canning, then Foreign Secretary, and his subsequent discussion with Gifford. When Barrow offered to review Louis-Chrétien de Guignes's recently published account of his experiences in east Asia while he was the French representative in Canton (1784–1800), Gifford agreed readily as ‘it is one at your fingers ends, and one that few know anything about … and I am gasping for something new’.

Barrow's remembrance is undoubtedly correct as far as it goes, but, like so many of his reminiscences, it holds back more than it reveals. As Canning knew but Gifford probably did not, Barrow and his protégé George Thomas Staunton, then on leave from his post with the British East India Company at Macao and Canton (Guangzhou), were actively negotiating a second British embassy to the Chinese imperial court. Canning may have suggested that the Quarterly provided an excellent forum for generating popular support. In any event, Barrow focused his review on de Guignes's report of the Dutch embassy to Peking (Beijing) in 1794–5, for which he had been interpreter – and which followed the first British embassy (1792–4) led by Lord Macartney – to highlight his conviction that the British, unlike the Dutch, had not failed in their objectives. In his view, the favourable treatment of Macartney's entourage, in such contrast to the denigration and humiliation heaped upon the Dutch, was clear evidence of the high regard and respect the Chinese held for the British. More importantly, the embassy had contributed significantly to increased knowledge of China.