OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [Princes Street 121
famous china emporium-has had many and various
occupants. In I 783, and before that period, it was
Poole?s Coffee-house, and till the days of Waterloo
was long known as a rendezvous for the many
military idlers who were then in Edinburgh-the
veterans of Egypt, Walcheren, the Peninsula, and
India-and for the officers of the strong garrison
. maintained there till the general peace. In July,
1783, by an advertisement, ?Mathew Poole returns
his most grateful acknowledgments to the
nobility and gentry for their past favours, and begs
leave respectfully to inform them that he has taken
the whole of the apartments above his coffee-house,
which he has fitted up in the neatest and most
genteel manner as a hotel. The airiness of the
situation and the convenience of the lodgings,
which are perfectly detached from each other,
render it very proper for families, and the advantage
of the coffee-house and tavern adjoining must
make it both convenient and agreeable for single
gen tlemen.?
In the Post Ofice Directory for 181 5, Nos. 3 and
14 appear as the hotels of Walker and Poole ; the
latter is now, and has been for many years, a portion
of the great establishment of Messrs. William
Renton and Co.
When, in the summer of 1822, Mr. Archibald
Constable, the eminent publisher, returned from
London to Edinburgh, he removed his establkhment
from the Old Town to the more commodious
and splendid premises, No. 10, Princes Street,
which he had acquired by purchase from the connections
of his second marriage, and in that yeat
he was included among the justices of the peace
for the city. ?Though with a strong dash of the
sanguine,? says Lockhart-? without which, indeed,
there can be no great projector in any ryalk of life-
Archibald Constable was one of the most sagacious
persons that ever followed his profession. . - .
Indeed, his fair and handsome physiognomy carried
a bland astuteness of expression not to be inistaken
by any one who could read the plainest of nature?s
handwriting. He made no pretensions to literature,
though he was, in fact, a tolerable judge of it
generally, and particularly well skilled in the department
of Scotch antiquities. He distrusted himself,
however, in such matters, being conscious that
his early education had been very imperfect ; and,
moreover, he wisely considered the business of a
critic quite as much out of his proper line as
authorship itself. But of that ?proper line,? and
his own qualifications for it, his estimation was
ample; and as often as I may have smiled at the
lofty serenity of his self-complacence, I confess
that I now doubt whether he rated himself too
highly as a master in the true science of the bookseller.
He was as bold as far-sighted, and his
disposition was as liberal as his views were
wide.?
In January, 1826, the public was astonished by
the bankruptcy at No. 10, Princes Street, when
Constable?s liabilities were understood to exceed
~250,000-a failure which led to the insolvency
of Ballantyne and Co., and of Sir Walter Scott,
who was connected with them both j and when it
became known that by bill transactions, &c., the
great novelist had rendered himself responsible for
debts to the amount of &IZO,OOO, of which not
above a half were actually incurred by himself.
Constable?s failure was the result of that of Messrs.
Hunt, Robinson, and Co., of London, who had
suspended payment of their engagements early in
the January of the same fatal year.
At the time of his bankruptcy Constable was
meditating a series of publications, which afterwards
were issued under the title of ?Constable?s Mis
cellany,? the precursor of that now almost universal
system of cheap publishing which renders the
present era one as much of reprint as of original
publication ; but soon after its commencement he
was attacked by a former disease, dropsy, and died
on the zIst of July, 1827, in the fifty-third year of
his age. His portrait by Raeburn is one of the
most successful likenesses of him.
No. 16, farther westward, was, in 1794, occupied
as Weir?s Museum, deemed in its time a
wonderful collection ?? of quadrupeds, birds, fishes,
insects, shells, fossils, minerals, petrifaction, and
anatomical preparations . . , . . . One cannot
help,? says Kincaid, ? admiring t.he birds from Port
Jackson, New South M7ales, for the extreme beauty
of their plumage j their appearance otherwise eb
hibits them as not deprived of life.?
It is of this collection that Lord Gardenstone
wrote, in his ?Travelling Memoranda? :-?I cannot
omit to observe that in the whole course of
my travels I have nowhere seen the preservation
of quadrupeds, birds, fishes, and insects executed
with such art and taste as by Mr. Alexander Weir
of Edinburgh. He is a most ingenious man, and
certainly has not hitherto been so much encouraged
by the public as his merit deserves.?
No. 27, a corner house, was in 1789 the
abode of the Honourable Henry Erskine, who
figures prominently in the remarkable collection of
Kay ; and in the same year No. 47 was occupied
by Lady Gordon of Lesmore, in the county of
Aberdeen, an old family, created baronets in 1625.
It.now forms a portion of the great premises of
Kennington and Jenner, the latter of whom is
