Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/154

120 i2o CONSTABLE, CADELL, AND BLACK. Mr. Miller of Albemarle^Street, and to Mr. Murray, then of Fleet Street, London, and in both cases the offer was eagerly accepted. Marmion, the poem in question, which had been announced by an advertisement in 1857, as Six Epistles from Ettrick Forest, met with an immense suc- cess, and 2000 copies, at a guinea and a half each, were disposed of in less than a month. As an instance of the freedom Constable left to Jeffrey in the conduct of the Review, we are not a little astonished to read that the venture, in which he had risked so much, was attacked in a most slashing man- ner in his own journal. Jeffrey, thinking nothing of so ordinary a circumstance, sent the article to Scott with a note stating that he would come to dinner on the following Tuesday. Scott, though wounded by the tone of the Review t did his best to conceal it. Mrs. Scott, however, was very cool in her manner, and, as Jeffrey was taking leave, could no longer restrain her pique, and in her broken English " Well, guid night, Mr. Jeffrey ; dey tell me you have abused Scott in the Review ; and I hope Mr. Constable has paid you well for writing it." This anecdote, insignificant in itself, prepares us to some extent for the coldness between them, which led Scott to originate;the Quarterly Re- view. Emboldened still further by the success of Mar- mion, Constable now engaged Scott to edit the works of Swift, and as Scott had several like engagements on hand he held, in fact, five separate agreements at the same time, for the London publishers offered him ^"1500 for his new undertaking. Constable was at this time in an apparently assured line of success. Though of a very sanguine nature