Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/149

115 CONSTABLE, CADELL, AND BLACK. 115 ' Tenui musam meditamur avena. ' ' We cultivate literature upon a little oatmeal.' But this was too near the truth to be admitted, and so we took our present grave motto from Publius Lyrus, of whom none of us had, I am sure, read a single line ; and so began what has since turned out to be a very important and able journal. When I left Edinburgh it fell into the stronger hands of Lord Jeffrey and Lord Brougham, and reached the highest point of popularity and success." It was resolved to bring out the first number of the work in June, 1802 ; but its outset was surrounded with many difficulties, arising from want of experience in its chief conductors. The meetings of the conspi- rators were held in a little room off Willison's (Con- stable's father-in-law's) office in Craig's-court, to which each man was requested to steal singly, by whichever way would be least suspicious ; and there they examined and criticised each other's productions, and corrected the proof sheets as they were thrown off. Here it was that Jeffrey once rushed down excitedly into Willison's printing-office, crying, " Where is your pepper-box, man your pepper- box ?" In vain the printer declared he had no such useful article on the premises ; Jeffrey persisted that the proof sheets must have been dusted with commas from a pepper-box, so lavish had the printer been with his points. Through various delays, typo- graphical and otherwise, the first number, as we have seen, did not appear until the following November. Lord Brougham, in the first volume of his recently- published autobiography, flatly contradicts this ac- count. " Nothing," he says, " can be more imaginary than nearly the whole of it." Still, when Sydney