That advice, given in 1825 to John Gibson Lockhart, who was tossing up between two editorial posts he had been offered, summed up a commonly held view of the relative positions of the newspaper as distinct from the periodical press in the first half of the nineteenth century. The publisher John Murray had plans to launch a newspaper, the Representative, while at the same time looking for a successor to John Taylor Coleridge, the current editor of his successful Quarterly Review (1809–1967). Lockhart's credentials for both posts were strong. As one of two young writers who, along with the publisher William Blackwood, were primarily responsible for the success of the pugnacious and high-spirited Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine ( 1817–1980), he had had nearly a decade of experience as a journalist. He appeared to relish the controversies, both literary and political, into which he and his colleague John Wilson, better known as ‘Christopher North’, had plunged Blackwood’s, and he had demonstrated an ability to turn out a prodigious amount of copy quickly.

The advice given by Murray's solicitor that the Quarterly Review was better suited to Lockhart's social position was endorsed by his fatherin-law, Sir Walter Scott, who was adamant that the editorship of a newspaper was not a desirable position for a member of the family. In the end Lockhart accepted Murray's invitation to edit the Quarterly, and the editorship of the ill-fated Representative went to the ambitious young Benjamin Disraeli.