Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

12 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
tween the two, by some fantastic rule of selection
which never has been fathomed by any man but a
heaven-born publisher. When the young man had
become independent and at liberty to follow his own
instincts, public taste was safeguarded by the un-
questionable reign of Scott, which nobody could gain-
say, and against which criticism was of as little avail
as the spray against a rock. But the very greatness
of Scott, and the romance of his sudden development
and his great semi-transparent secret, produced a
general vividness of expectation in the mind of the
age of other triumphs that might be to come. And
the gift of discernment was never more wanted than at
a time when new codes were forming, and there were
audacious critics who did not fear to crack a joke
upon the Man of Feeling, or even doubt the infalli-
bility of Alison on Taste.
As soon as he had finished his apprenticeship, which
was in 1797, young Blackwood was engaged by Messrs
Mundell & Co.—a publishing firm in Edinburgh, which
has not attained general fame, though we hear that
its after-failure created almost a panic in " the Trade,"
and brought down several smaller houses — as the
agent and manager of a branch establishment which it
proposed to set up in Glasgow. It does not seem to
have attained much success in what was at that time
by no means a literary city ; but one of its transac-
tions is recorded, in which we should be glad to think
our young agent had been directly employed. Mundell
& Co. were the publishers who bought from
Thomas Campbell the poem which first brought him
into notice, the " Pleasures of Hope "—the price given,
it is said, being "fifty printed copies" of the work,