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Of Henry Glassford Bell, the Sheriff of Lanarkshire, we may say, as Macaulay said of Johnston, "We are familiar with his personal appearance, as with the faces that have surrounded us from childhood." For nearly half-a-century he has been a foremost citizen in Glasgow. During that long period he has taken an active interest in all that relates to the welfare of the city. Not in Law alone, but in Music, Literature, Painting, and the Fine Arts generally, he is regarded as an authority. In short, he is the intellectual king of the city, although he differs from a monarch de juré in his accessibility to all ranks and conditions of men, and in the homage and respect which are universally and spontaneously paid to his high personal qualities. His experience is a direct reversal of the ordinary rule, that "a prophet hath honour save in his own country and in his own house." In tracing the lines of Sheriff Bell's biography, we are entering upon a fertile but hitherto unoccupied field. A man of rare gifts, and one of whose happiest literary productions it may safely be predicated that they will live in the literature of his country, he has now for upwards of thirty years relinquished the pursuit of belles lettres, thereby sacrificing the world-wide fame as an author to which, in the early part of his career, he seemed likely to attain. But if he has failed to achieve a niche in the Temple of Fame, he has at least secured a permanent place in the respect of the legal profession, and in the esteem of his fellow-citizens. If the scope of his mind has been narrowed by the arduous and incessant labour devolved upon him by his official position, he has yet been enabled to lead a life of more than ordinary usefulness; and future generations will probably listen with wonder and admiration, when they hear of the extraordinary amount of hard and irksome labour which, when the eight or nine hours' movement was yet in embryo, the Sheriff of a county embracing a third of the population of Scotland was able to accomplish.

Born in Glasgow in 1805, Sheriff Bell is descended from an honourable and honoured family. His father followed the practice of the law, and educated Henry to the same career. It did not seem, however, as if the son cared to have his father's mantle falling upon him. After receiving the rudiments of his education at the High School of Glasgow, he proceeded to Edinburgh, where he commenced to go through a regular University curriculum. So far as the Scottish metropolis was concerned, the first quarter of the present century was the Augustan age of literature. Sir Walter Scott was in his meridian. De Quincey, under the influence of the "Circean spells" of opium, was making Blackwood a power in the land. Sir William Hamilton, the greatest British supporter of à priori philosophy in this century, had just been appointed to the Chair of Civil History. Through the columns of the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey was "propounding heresies of all sorts against the ruling fancies of the day, whether political, poetical, or social." John Wilson, "Christopher North," that "monster of erudition," was acting as the animating soul of his celebrated magazine. Amid such a galaxy of brilliant constellations, Henry Bell graduated for a literary career, and he was not esteemed the least of the parhelions that shone around the fixed stars in that spacious intellectual firmament. By contact and association with such men, he enjoyed exceptional facilities for qualifying himself as an author; and having the "root of the matter" in him, he published, in rapid succession, poems, sketches, and reviews that were more than sufficient to justify the compliment which the Ettrick Shepherd years afterwards pronounced upon them, when he said, "Man, Henry, it was a great pity ye didna stick to literature; 'od, Sir, ye micht hae done something at literature."

Finding, perhaps, that his tastes were literary rather than legal—that he had a greater aptitude for belles lettres than jurisprudence—young Bell, on the 15th November, 1828, undertook the Editorship of the Edinburgh Literary Journal. He was then twenty-three years of age. The Journal professed to be a "weekly register of criticism and belles lettres." It contained fourteen pages of royal octavo, and its price was sixpence. The motto of the Literary Journal—it was often the custom in those days to select a motto for periodical publications—was the following taken from Bruyere:—