Even during this its greatest period, however, Romanticism had for a time a hard battle to fight, and a chief literary fact of the period was the founding and continued success of the first two important English literary and political quarterlies. The Edinburgh Review and The Quarterly Review which in general stood in literature for the conservative eighteenth century tradition and violently attacked all, or almost all the Romantic poets. These quarterlies are sufficiently important to receive a few words in passing. In the later eighteenth century there had been some periodicals devoted to literary criticism, but they were mere un authoritative booksellers organs, and its was left for the new reviews to inaugurate literary journalism of the modern serious type.