Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/284

246 246 CHAMBERS, KNIGHT, AND CASSELL. When Leigh Hunt, in 1834, established his London Journal, he announced that he intended to follow the plan of Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, " with a more southern element " added. This compliment, from a veteran so famous and so experienced, led to an interchange of editorial courtesies, in the course of which Robert Chambers claimed the distinction for his brother William which had been somewhere awarded to Leigh Hunt of having been the first to introduce cheap periodical literature of a superior class. Leigh Hunt, in reply, while upholding his own title to priority by the indubitable evidence of the dates of his Indicator, Tatler, &c., cordially admitted that his young rivals had more wisely achieved the desired end by interesting a wider and less educated public. In a few years all Edinburgh proved to be equal only to produce the Scotch edition of the Journal, a branch house was established in the English metro- polis, the command of which was entrusted to a younger brother, Mr. David Chambers, who was born in the year 1820, and who was afterwards taken into partnership. Unlike his brothers, he had little taste for literature. In connection with the subsequent conduct of the Journal, we may mention the names of T. Smibert and Leich Ritchie (both deceased), and Mr. W. H. Wills, and Mr. James Payn, the sensational novelist, who for many years has had the leading conduct. In 1844, Robert Chambers published a work written in conjunction with Dr. Carruthers, afterwards greatly enlarged, which takes a far higher rank than any pre- ceding compilation of a similar character. This was Chambers' "Cyclopaedia of English Literature," in