Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/156

122 overwhelmed with the manuscripts of embryo genius. One or two stories are worth repeating of the men who applied to him, but in vain. Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, had already sold a volume of minor poems to Constable, when setting to work in earnest he went to him again; but "the Crafty" was too wise to buy a pig in a poke, and refused to have anything to do with the matter until he had seen the MS. This reasonable request the poet refused with, "What skill have you about the merit of a book?" "It may be so, Hogg," replied the Jupiter Tonans of Scottish publishers; "but I know as well how to sell a book as any man, which should be some consequence of yours, and I know too how to buy one." Hogg, however, easily found another publisher, and the Queen's Wake was soon as widely popular as its great merits deserved.

The other refusal, unfortunately, did not end in the same happy manner. Robert Tannahill, a Scotch weaver, whose songs in their artless sweetness, their simplicity of diction, their tenderness of sentiment, have long since won distinction, came up to Edinburgh very poor in purse, but rich in the future that poetic aspirations imaged forth. He put his manuscripts into Constable's hands, offering the whole of them at a very small price. Day after day he waited for an answer, with a mind alternating between hope and fear. Constable, who always distrusted his own judgment in such matters, and who, perhaps, at the moment had no one else to consult, eventually returned the poems. Tannahill in a madness of despair put a period to his existence, adding one to those "young shadows" who hover round the shrine of genius, as if to warn all but the boldest from attempting to approach it.