210 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [High Street.
likely to have arisen. It happened by accident
that the Earl of Bothwell, coming out of the Earl
of Crawford?s lodging, was met by the Earl of Marr,
who was coming out of the Laird of Lochleven?s
lodging hard by; as it being about ten o?clock at
night, and so dark that they could not know one
another, he passed by, not knowing that the
Master of Glammis was there, but thinking it was
only the Earl of Marr. However, it was said that
some ambushment of men and hackbuttiers had
been duressed in the house by command of both
parties.?
Some brawl or tragedy had evidently been on
the tapis, for next day the king had the Earl of
Bothwell and the Master before him at Holyrood,
and committed the former to ward .in the Palace
of Linlithgow, and the latter in the Castle of Edinburgh,
? for having a band of hacquebuttiers in
ambush with treasonable intent.?
Passing to more peaceable times, on the same
side of the street, we come to one of the most
picturesque edifices in it, numbered as 155 (and
nearly opposite Niddry Street), in which Allan
Ramsay resided and began his earlier labours, ?at
the sign of the Mercury,? before he removed, in
1726, to the shop in the Luckenbooths, where we
saw him last.
It is an ancient timber-fronted land, the sinplarly
picturesque aspect of which was much marred
by some alterations in 1845, but herein worthy
Allan first prosecuted his joint labours of author,
editor, and bookseller. From this place he issued
his poems in single or half sheets, as they were
mitten ; but in whatever shape they always found
a ready sale, the citizens being wont to send their
children with a penny for ? Allan Ramsay?s last
piece.? Here it was, that in 1724 he published
the first volume of ?The Tea Table Miscellany,?
a collection of songs, Scottish and English,
dedicated
? To ilka lovely British lass,
Frae Ladies Charlotte, Anne and Jean,
Wha dances barefoot on the green.?
This publication ran through twelve editions, and
its early success induced him in the same year to
bring out ? The Evergreen,? a collection of Scottish
poems, ?? wrote by the Ingenious before 1600,?
professed to be selected from the Bannatyne MSS.
And here it was that .Ramsay- had some of his
hard struggles with the magistrates and clergy,
who deemed and denounced all light literature,
songs, and plays, as frivolity and open profanity, in
She sour fanatical spirit of the age.
Doon to ilk bonny singing Bess
Religion, in form, entered more into the daily
habits of the Scottish people down to 1730 than it
now does. Apart from regular attendance at
church, and daily family worship, each house had
some species of oratory, wherein, according to the
Domestic Annals, ? the head of the family could
at stated times retire for his private devotions,
which were usually of a protracted kind, and often
accompanied by great moanings and groanings,
expressive of an intense sense of human worthlessness
without the divine favour.? Twelve
o?clock was the hour for the cold Sunday dinner.
(? Nicety and love of rich feeding were understood
to be the hateful peculiarities of the English, and
unworthy of the people who had been so much
more favoured by God in the knowledge of matters
of higher concern.? Puritanic rigour seemed to
be destruction for literature, and when Addison,
Steele, and Pope, were conferring glory on that of
England, Scotland had scarcely a writer of note ;
and Allan Ramsay, in fear and trembling of legal
and clerical censure, lent out the plays of Congreve
and Farquhar from that quaint old edifice
numbered 155, High Street.
The town residence of the Ancrum family was
long one of the finest specimens of the timberfronted
tenements of the High Street. It stood on
the north side, at the head of Trunk?s Close,
behind the Fountain Well, and though it included
several rooms with finely-stuccoed ceilings, and a
large hall, beautifully decorated with rich pilasters
and oak panelling-and was undoubtedly worthy
of being preserved-it was demolished in 1873.
Here was the first residence of Scott of Kirkstyle,
who, in 1670, obtained a charter under the great
seal of the barony of Ancrum, and in the following
year was created Sir John Scott, Baronet, by
Charles 11.
In 1703 the house passed into the possession of
Sir Gilbert Elliot, Bart., of Stobs, who resided here
with his eight sons, the youngest of whom, for his
glorious defence of Gibraltar, was created Lord
Heathfield in 1787.
On the same side of the street, Archibald
Constable, perhaps the most eminent publisher
that Scotland has produced, began business in a
small shop, in the year 1795, and from there, in
the November .of that year, he issued the first of
that series of sale catalogues of curious and rare
books, which he continued for a few years to
issue at intervals, and which attracted to his shop
all the bibliographers and lovers of literature in
Edinburgh.
Hither came, almost daily, such men as Richard
Heber, afterwards M.P. for the University of
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?
