Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/235



E have already, in our account of Archibald Constable, shown how deeply the brilliant writers—who for a while gave a bold literary supremacy to the northern capital—were indebted to the daring spirit and the generous purse of one Scottish publisher; we have here to follow the narrative of a rival's life a life at outset very similar, but soon diverging widely, and which, actuated by very different principles, and aiming at very different results, was destined to open the arena of literary struggle to those whom honest political feeling had for a moment rendered dumb and inactive.

William Blackwood was born at Edinburgh, on the 20th Nov., 1776, of parents in an humble position in life, who, however, with the honest endeavour of most of their class in the north, contrived to give him a very excellent elementary education. From his earliest days, William had exhibited a strong love for books, and at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to Bell and Bradfute, of his native city; nor, indeed, did his education suffer from this premature removal from school; there is much leisure in a bookseller's shop,