Surveying the "railway stalls" where the modern reader bought his literature in 1855, Walter Bagehot observed that a large space was filled by the "review-like essay and the essay-like review." The best examples of this genre were couched in an unbuttoned, digressive style, more like the "talk of the man of the world" than the "lecture of a professor."
As Stefan Collini points out in Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics, itself a collection of review-like essays and essay-like reviews, Bagehot's attitude to "review writing" was actually more ambivalent than this makes it sound. He regarded reviewing as something "able men" fell into rather than chose as a vocation and looked back longingly at the "old days of systematic arguments and regular discussion."
If you're a subscriber to Prospect, you can read the rest of my review of Common Reading by Stefan Collini in the new issue of that magazine.