Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

26 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
brain of the author of ' Waverley.' This confidence
had seemed justified by long experience, and it was
the very breath of the eager booksellers, on tiptoe to
find in the first young gentleman who came into their
shop with a manuscript in his pocket another Scott,
or perhaps a Byron, ready to take the world by storm.
" Abandoning the old timid and grudging system, he
stood out as the general patron and payer of all pro-
mising publications, and confounded not only his rivals
in trade but his very authors by his unheard-of prices,"
says Lord Cockburn, speaking of Constable.
" Ten,
even twenty guineas a-sheet for a review, £2000 or
£3000 for a single poem, and £1000 for two philo-
sophical dissertations, drew authors out of their dens,
and made Edinburgh a literary mart famous with
strangers, and the pride of its own citizens." It was
in one great case a sort of madness while it lasted,
and brought its natural catastrophe : but the result in
others was much prosperity and success, and in the
first stage it stimulated every brain, and half con-
vinced the world that Poetry, Romance, Philosophy,
and even Criticism, were the first crafts and the most
profitable in the world.
Of all the young booksellers who thus set out
almost at the same moment, 1808, to benefit their
country and develop literature,—among whom might
also be reckoned the new firm of John Ballantyne &
Co., a short-lived competitor, though its possession
of the favour of Scott and a large stock of unsaleable
books made it for as long as it lasted a stumbling-
block in everybody's way,—Blackwood was the only
man who may be said permanently to have mastered
fortune. He was rash like the others, but not so