Among Thomas Pringle's wide Edinburgh circle in his years at Register House, James Hogg, already famous in Scotland and beyond as the Ettrick Shepherd, was probably the most active in his interest, albeit with side effects that must have given Pringle much pain. To have published the ‘Letter to Mr R. S****’and attributed it to the most celebrated living English poet of the time was the first such injury. Another was to claim the credit for the major step Pringle took the year after The Poetic Mirror had appeared. Pringle's love of literature and the antiquarian knowledge he had acquired through his work for Thomas Thomson encouraged him in forming a plan to found and edit a new journal of literature and politics. It would include antiquarianism, a new interest much advanced by Scott.

Since the great days of the Scottish Enlightenment, when the economist Adam Smith and the historian David Hume were household names in Europe, Edinburgh had become a major centre of publishing and printing. Its journals, above all the Whig Edinburgh Review, set a new standard for literary and political analysis and debate, with poets as heirs to Robert Burns and a poet and novelist Walter Scott, a colossus of early nineteenth-century literature. It is all the more remarkable that an obscure young clerk with no grand connections should bring back to Edinburgh and Britain a major competitor of the Edinburgh Review to be published by William Blackwood, a Tory bookseller of great ambition.