Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/253

217 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD. 217 this important department of the concern is entrusted. Then you have an elegant oval saloon, lighted from the roof, where various groups of loungers and literary dilet- tanti are engaged in looking at, or criticising among themselves, the publications just arrived by that day's coach from town. In such critical colloquies, the voice of the bookseller himself may ever and anon be heard mingling the broad and unadulterated notes of its Auld Reekie's music ; for, unless occupied in the recesses of the premises with some other business, it is here that he has his usual station. He is a nimble, active-looking man of middle age, and moves from one corner to another with great alacrity, and appar- ently under the influence of high animal spirits. His complexion is very sanguinous, but nothing can be more intelligent, keen, and sagacious than the expres- sion of the physiognomy ; above all the gray eyes and eye-brows, as full of locomotion as those of Catalani's. The remarks he makes are in general extremely acute much more so indeed than any other member of the trade I ever heard speak upon such topics. The shrewdness and decision of the man can, however, stand in need of no testimony beyond what his own conduct has afforded above all in the establishment of his magazine (the conception of which I am as- sured was entirely his own) and the subsequent energy with which he has supported it through every variety of good and evil fortune. It would be unfair to lay upon his shoulders any portion of the blame which any part of his book may have deserved ; but it is impossible to deny that he is well entitled to whatever merit may be supposed to be due to the erection of a work founded in the main upon good principles, both political and religious, in a city where