Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

6 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
of meeting to the writer and the reader, the man
who had something to say and the many men who
desired nothing better than to listen. He is the
first we know of who made his shop an agreeable
lounge for clever persons, where professors and wits
and scholars from the College and Parliament House,
and lairds and lords from the country, who loved a
new book, might drop in to talk and turn over such
new publications as found their way to the North,
and where strangers belonging to what was called
the Bepublic of Letters were received with en-
thusiasm. The smiling master of the place was no
Jacob Tonson, nor was there a Grub Street, so far
as appears, in the Scots capital. On the contrary,
the fashion of the time was to consider literature
something too fine and sacred to be produced for
money. Jeffrey himself, so much later, had an apolo-
getic air when he suggested the £10 a -sheet, which
was a mere "acknowledgment," not to insult the
divine fire by even a possibility that it could be
brought down from heaven for a price. The early
Edinburgh booksellers were men who themselves
dabbled in that craft of which they had all the
loftier opinion because of what they would have
called their " trifling with the Muses." Creech and
Smellie, two of the first of those booksellers, the
latter a printer besides, wrote Fugitive Pieces, of the
most elegant, moral, and sentimental tendency : some
of which may have appeared in the 'Lounger' or
* Mirror,' two mild imitations of the ' Spectator,' under
the conduct of Henry Mackenzie, the most superlative
of literary leaders, of whom Edinburgh was reveren-
tially proud—the Man of Feeling, as he was devoutly