Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 2.djvu/276

570 In the year 1825, Mr Constable projected perhaps the most remarkable of all his undertakings—a Miscellany of Original and Selected Works, in Literature, Art, and Science, which he designed to publish in small fasciculi at one shilling, every three constituting a volume. Having marked the tendency towards a system of cheap popular reading, which was at this time very observable in the public mind and in the bookselling business, he had resolved to take advantage of the irresistible impulse, for the reproduction of some of his best copyrights; calculating securely that these, especially if mixed up with new productions from the pens of the best modern writers, would appropriate a large share of the patronage extended by the people to cheap works, while the vast sale that might be expected as a consequence of their humble price, could not fail to afford an ample remuneration to all concerned. The design was one worthy, in its daring novelty and its liberal promise, of a publisher who, in almost all his enterprises, had shown a comprehensiveness of mind above his fellows. Nor can it be doubted that, if carried into execution with the whole powers of the original house, and the prestige which the name of Constable now carried to every British ear, it would have met with a success more than sufficient to redeem the fortunes of the establishment. Unfortunately the commercial distresses which marked the close of 1825, operated unfavourably upon a London firm with which Archibald Constable and Company were intimately connected, and at the close of the January of the ensuing year both were compelled to stop payment. The debts of the latter house were understood to be about a quarter of a million, for a considerable part of which Sir Walter Scott unfortunately stood responsible. The stock, in which the subject of this memoir was wont to contemplate an immense fund of dormant wealth, was consequently sequestered, and its real value, (especially on a peremptory sale) being very different from the apparent, it sufficed to discharge but a small part of the existing obligations.

Mr Constable, who at this time had the young family arising from his second marriage springing up around him, now retired into comparative privacy, to experience the usual fate of those whom fortune has suddenly deserted. Most of his friends, having suffered considerably by his bankruptcy, and being deeply impressed with a sense of the imprudence which had led to that event, paid him no longer any regard, though, while his fortunes lived, they would have given "fifty, nay, an hundred ducats for his portrait in little." Notwithstanding these painful circumstances, to which was soon added a return of some dropsical ailments which had formerly afflicted him, he resolved to make an endeavour for the support of his family, by commencing, though with material restrictions of plan, the Miscellany which had formerly been announced. Having made the necessary arrangements with the trustee upon the sequestered estate, he issued the first number late in the year 1826, being the beginning of a reproduction of captain Basil Hall's Travels, which that gentleman, with a kindness worthy of his distinguished abilities, had conferred as a present upon the veteran publisher. Though unable now to command all the copyrights and new productions which he originally contemplated, he succeeded in calling around him some of the rising talent of the day, and would in all probability have soon been once more engaged in an extensive and enterprising course of business, if death had not stepped in to claim his part. Mr Constable gradually sank under his dropsical ailment, and, on the 21st of July in the year just named, breathed his last, at his house in Park Place, in the fifty-second year of his age. Mr Constable was of middle stature, and, in his latter years, of somewhat unwieldy bulk; his countenance, a fair index to his mind, displayed lineaments of uncommon nobleness and beauty.