High Street.] CONSTABLES SHOP. 211 .
Oxford ; Mr. Alexander Campbell, author of the
(? History of Scottish Poetry ?; Dr. Alexander
Murray, the famous self-taught philologist ; Dr.
John Leyden, who died at Java; Mr. (afterwards
Sir Walter) Scott ; Sir John Graham Dalzell ; and
many others distinguished for a taste in Scottish
literature and historical antiquities, including I)r.
Jarnes Browne, author of the ?History of the
Highland Clans,? and one of the chief contributors
to Constable?s Edinburgh Magazine.
The works of some of these named were among
the first issued from Constable?s premises in the
High Street, where his obliging manners, professional
intelligence, personal activity, and prompt
attention to the wishes of all, soon made him
popular with a great literary circle ; but his actual
reputation as a publisher may be said to have
commenced with the appearance, in October, I 802,
of the first number of the Edihburgh Rtwiew.
His conduct towards the contributors of that
famous quarterly was alike discreet and liberal,
and to his business tact and straightforward
deportment, next to the genius and talent of the
projectors, much of its subsequent success must
be attributed.
In 1804 he admitted as a partner Mr. Hunter
of Blackness, and the firm took the name of
Constable and Co. ; and after various admissions,
changes, and deaths, his sole partner in 1812 was
Mr. Robert Cadell. In 1805 he started 2%
Edinburgh Medical and Surgicd Journal, a work
nrojected in concert with Dr. Andrew Duncan;
and in the same year, in conjunction with Longman
and Co., of London, he published ? The Lay
of the Last Minstrel,? the first of that long series of
romantic publications in poetry and prose which
immortalised the name of Scott, to whom he gave
LI,OOO for ?Marmion? before a line of it was
written. In conjunction with Messrs. Millar
and Murray, and after many important works, including
the ? Encyclopzedia Britannica,? had issued
from his establishment in 1814, he brought out the
first of the ? Waverley Novels.?
Constable?s shop ?? is situated in the High Street,?
says Peter in his ?Letters to his Kinsfolk,? ?in
the midst of the old town, where, indeed, the
greater part of the Edinburgh booksellers are still
to be found lingering (as the majority of their
London brethren also do) in the neighbourhood of
the same old haunts to which long custom has
attached their predilections. On entering, one
sees a place by no means answering, either in point
of dimensions or in point of ornament, to the
notion one might be apt to form of the shop from
which so many mighty works are every day issuing
-a low, dusky chamber, inhabited by a few clerks,
ind lined with an assortment of unbound books and,
stationery-entirely devoid of all those luxurious
attractions of sofas and sofa-tables and books of
prints, &c., which one meets with in the superb
nursery of the Quarter+ Revim in Albemarle
Street. The bookseller himself is seldom to be
seen in this part of his premises ; he prefers to sit
in a chamber immediately above, where he can
proceed with his owo work without being disturbed
by the incessant cackle of the young Whigs who
lounge beiow ; and where few casual visitors are
admitted to enter his presence, except the more
important members of the great Whig Corporation
-reviewers either in esse, or at least supposed to
be so in posse-contributors to the supplement of
the ?Encyclopxdia Britannica.? . . . . The
bookseller is himself a good-looking man, apparently
about forty, very fat in his person, with a
face having good lines, and a fine healthy complexion.
He is one of the most jolly-looking
members of the trade I ever saw, and, moreover,
one of the most pleasing and courtly in his address.
One thing that is?remarkable about him,
and, indeed, very distinguishingly so, is his total
want of that sort of critical jabber of which most
of his brethren are so profuse, and of which custom
has rendered me rather fond than otherwise. Mr.
Constable is too much of a bookseller to think it
at all necessary that he should appear to be
knowing in the merits of books. His business is
to publish books ; he leaves the work of examining
them before they are published, and criticising
them afterwards, to others who have more leisure
on their hands than he has.?
In the same ?Letters? we are taken to the
publishing establishment of Manners and Millar,
on the opposite side of the High Street--(? the true
lounging-place of the blue-stockings and literary
beau monde of the Northern metropolis,? but long
since extinct.
Unlike Constable?s premises, there the anterooms
were spacious and elegant, adorned with
busts and prints, while the back shop was a veritable
btjbu ; ?its walls covered with all the?most
elegant books in fashionable request, arrayed in
the most luxurious clothing of Turkey and Russia
leather, red, blue, and green-and protected by
glass folding doors from the intrusion even of the
little dust which might be supposed to threaten a
place kept so delicately trim. The grate exhibits
a fine blazing fire, or in its place a fresh bush of
hawthorn, stuck all over with roses and lilies, and
gay as a maypole,? while paintings by Turner,
Thomson, and Williams meet the eye on every?
