Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/152

118 Ii8 CONSTABLE, CAD ELL, AND BLACK. Constable, who had at first been rather startled and alarmed at the design of the Edinburgh Review, was not prepared, any more than the projectors themselves, for its immediate and splendid success. Without a publisher of his cast of mind the work, however, might have encountered some difficulties, and he was not slow to perceive, nor backward to follow, that line of conduct towards its conductors, without the ob- servance of which the new relations between them could not long have been sustained harmoniously. The present proprietors of the work became, some years after its commencement, sharers of the property, but the publishing department remained, we believe, under his direction for many years. In 1804 Constable assumed as partner Alexander Gibson Hunter, of Blackness, and from that time the business was carried on under the title of Archibald Constable and Co. In the following year, 1805, he added to the list of his periodicals the Medical and Surgical Journal, a work projected in concert with Dr. Andrew Duncan, and which existed till 1855, when it was united to the Medical Journal of Science. It was in this year, also, that the firm published a poem, which was eventually to do more for the en- largement of their business and the honour of their name than even the famous Review itself. Walter Scott, as we have seen, while still un- known to fame, had been a frequent visitor at Con- stable's old book-shop. The publishers of the first edition of the Lay of tJic Last Minstrel were Long- man and Co. of London, and Archibald Constable and Co. of Edinburgh ; the latter firm taking but a small venture in the risk. -The profit was to be di- vided equally between the author and the publishers,