Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/275

237 CHAMBERS, KNIGHT, AND CASSELL. 237 filled my hands in childhood. At twelve I was deep, not only in poetry and fiction, but in encyclopaedias." Receiving his first education at the Burgh Grammar School, he acquired afterwards, at the Edinburgh High School, under the tuition of Mr. Benjamin Mackay, the usual elements of a classical education, embracing, indeed, as much Latin as enabled him in after-life to read Horace with ease and pleasure. After months of pence-scraping and book-hoarding, Robert succeeded in collecting a stock worth about forty shillings ; and with nothing but these, his yearn- ing for independence, and his determination to write books by-and-by, and at present to sell them, the young boy of sixteen opened a little shop or stall in Leith Street. His brother William, after serving an apprenticeship to a Mr. Sutherland, also started as a bookseller and printer in the immediate neighbour- hood ; and from this time forward a time when most boys were cursing the master's ferule and the Latin syntax they were both independent. Of this period Robert gives the following graphic and almost pain- fully accurate account in a letter to Hugh Miller, written in 1854 : " Your autobiography has set me a thinking of my own youthful days, which were like yours in point of hardship and humiliation, though different in many important circumstances. My being of the same age with you, to exactly a quarter of a year, brings the idea of a certain parity more forcibly upon me. The differences are as curious to me as the resemblances. Notwithstanding your wonderful success as a writer, I think my literary tendency must have been a deeper and more absorbing peculiarity than yours, seeing