Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

14 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
which I could send you at the following prices : Sir Thomas
More's "Works, 2 vol. fol., black-letter, fair, J. Cawood, Lond.
1557, 19s. The Works of W. Tyndal, J. Frith, and Dr Barnes,
black-letter, fol., fair, John Daye, Lond. 1573, 9s. (You will
see both of these in White or Egerton's last catalogues.) Home
on Bleaching, 8vo, Edin. 1756, 7s. 6d. Pardovan's Collection,
8vo, Edin. 1770, 6s. 6d. Keynolds' Triumphs of God's Eevenge
against Murther, fol., Lond. 1640, 5s. 6d. ; Gildse, de excidio et
conquestu Britanniae, etc., epistola, 18mo, J. Daius, Lond. 1568.
This, I believe, is a scarce little book, but I cannot see it in any
catalogue, so I leave the price of it to yourself.
This would seem to be about the beginning of his
independent dealings, and the young man was no
doubt picking up knowledge along with the experi-
mental volumes. But they show at least how his
mind and his thoughts were turning. It is curious
to note the mixture of new and old, of the humbler
and the more ambitious enterprises, which was so
much a matter of course in those days. The book-
seller of the beginning century would not seem to
have been aware that the sale of old books was in any
respect a less worthy work than the production of the
new. He stepped from one to another with the most
easy simplicity. Constable was still buying and sell-
ing libraries, and undertaking their regulation and
arrangement, when he began the publication of the
Waverley Novels. It is a strange conjunction.
William Blackwood came back to Edinburgh, after
a year's absence, a fresh-coloured lively youth, twenty-
two, not averse to talk, full of notions of his own—as
likely a lad as could be met with in the little busy
world of intellectual Edinburgh, where there was a
great deal of liveliness and much talk, and unusual
intercourse among all classes on the subject of books.