Over the course of the journal's first year, with competing captains at the helm and few men at the pumps, the Quarterly Review nearly foundered. The journal was buoyed by Robert Southey's contribution and it was finally set on its course by the arrival in Number 4 of a freshening wind. Though it was terribly late (it should have appeared at the end of November but it was not published until 23 December 1809), it was the best issue to date. For this number, Murray recorded some interesting extra costs, a £25 bonus for the editor perhaps for producing the journal with minimal assistance, an additional £13 10s. for Southey, one in a series of top-ups that soon led to his earning a standard £100 per article, and £2.19 to reprint the wrappers. Murray incurred the latter expense to alter the journal's price from 5 to 6 shillings, an adjustment that permitted the Quarterly Review to begin to pay its expenses and eventually to become highly profitable.

Number 4 was the inaugural issue for two reviewers who made a major contribution to the Quarterly's future success, John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty, whose travel reviews came to be a staple and much-anticipated feature of the journal, and Robert Grant, who helped establish the Quarterly's reputation for brilliant writing and authoritative information.

John Barrow was introduced to the Quarterly hard on the heels of the incorporation of his soon-to-be superior at the Admiralty John Wilson Croker into the journal's editorial council. Croker was present at one or more of the April–July 1809 meetings attended by Canning, Scott, Murray, Ellis, Heber, and Gifford, some of which took place in the back room of Murray's Fleet Street shop and at least one of which was held in the Westminster office of Croker's father. Croker or Canning must have suggested at one of these meetings that Barrow should be approached and so it fell to Canning in July to request that Barrow call on Gifford. Barrow's inaugural review – of a Chinese work just off the press –was the first of almost two hundred articles he contributed up to the end of 1824.