Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/144

112 which soon drew to his shop all the bibliographers and lovers of learning in the city. In this line of trade he speedily acquired considerable eminence, not so much by the extensiveness of his stock, for his capital was of the smallest, as by his personal activity, his congenial curiosity, and his quick intelligence. Here it was that Heber, in the course of his bibliomaniacal prowlings, came across Leyden, perched perpetually on a ladder reading some venerable folio, which his purse forbade him to purchase, but which through Constable's kindness was placed in this manner at his disposal. Heber soon brought him under Scott's notice, and thus had the pleasure of introducing the two most promising young men of the day to each other. Constable had, however, an ambition too strong to be satisfied with the routine business of a second-hand book-shop. Even before his shop in the High Street was fairly opened, he had himself offered a book to the trade—a reprint of Bishop Beveridge's Private Thoughts on Religion, struck off coarsely upon a whitey-brown sort of "tea-paper;" but still it was his first, and, as Archibald proudly said, "it was a pretty enough little bookie!"

Among other publications in which from his first outset he had been engaged, and which at the time he esteemed as by no means inconsiderable, were Campbell's "History of Scottish Poetry," Dalzell's "Fragments of Scottish History," and Leyden's edition of the "Complaint of Scotland." In 1801 he acquired the property of the Scots Magazine, a miscellany which had commenced in 1739, and which was still esteemed as a repository of curious facts. This congenial publication engaged at first a considerable share of his personal attention, and, aided by the