Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/175

141 CONSTABLE, CAtiELL, AND BLACK. 14! century that any attempt was made at arranging the matter in a systematic manner, though the Arabians are said to have had a true Encyclopedia centuries before that date. It was long, however, before the idea occurred of employing the lexographic plan as a basis of a universal repertoire of learning, and the first great step in advance was the Lexicon Technician of Dr. Harris, completed and published at London in the year 1710. The Cydopcedia of Ephraim Chambers, with which we have previously dealt, appeared in 1728, and for a long time was the supreme authority ; through its success at home and abroad a new impulse was given to the desire for such publications. In France the Encyclopedic was projected by the Abbe de Gua, and was based originally on an unpublished translation of Chambers's Cyclopaedia, made by an Englishman named Mills, In consequence of a quarrel with the publishers, De Gua threw it up, and it was then transferred to Diderot and D'Alembert ; to become the text-book of the French philosophers. The publication of the seventeen volumes extended from 1751 to 1765, and six years after the latter date appeared the first volume of the Encyclopedia Britan- nica. The plan and all the principal articles of this now important work were in this first edition devised and written by William Smellie. Smellie began life as a compositor, and he used to lay down his composing-stick for an hour or two daily to attend the classes of the Edinburgh Uni- versity. At the age of nineteen he was engaged by Murray and Cochrane as corrector of their press in general and conductor and compiler of the 'Scots Magazine at a salary of sixteen shillings a week. If