Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

36 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
been regularly published." There is a balance-sheet
of the transaction between Goldie and Hogg enclosed
with these old letters — by which it appears that
Hogg received for the slim volume of poetry no less
a sum than £245, a reward which a minor poet in our
own day would certainly think no unsubstantial one.
It was not, however, until the year 1816 that
Blackwood came out prominently in literary his-
tory, through the means of a remarkable and tan-
talising incident, which we shall fully relate in the
following chapter, as it is one of which the right particulars
have never been known,—the transaction by
which he became for a moment the publisher of Scott,
with intoxicating hopes of a transference to himself
of the position previously secured by Constable—and
the distinction of seeing his name on the title-page of
the Waverley Novels, the thing most coveted by every
publisher existing. In the meantime he had changed
his establishment from the South Bridge to 17 Princes
Street, an address soon made memorable as the headquarters
of a literary group unequalled in Edinburgh
or within the limits of Great Britain. He was now
not the agent of Murray only, but also of Messrs
Cadell & Davies, in London, and had shaken from his
fingers for ever the dusty traces of the old books. As
the remarkable literary incident to which we have
referred is too long to come in at the end of a chapter,
we may here place, though it is in some degree antici-
pating our story, the account of one of those dis-
coveries which publishers still are proud to make, and
which brought a new novelist, who has proved a permanent
distinction to her age and country, before the
world.