Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/289

Rh time confined to his home through illness, that it caused the rupture of a blood-vessel in the liver, and three days after this he followed his elder brother; like him he had been an earnest friend of press reform, and had devoted much of his time to promoting the repeal of the fiscal restrictions upon newspapers.

Mr. William Chambers, who undertook from the first the largest share in the mercantile concerns of the firm, has still found time to accomplish a large amount of literary work. In addition to the book previously mentioned, he has published, among others, "Travels in Italy," and a "History of Peebleshire," and the "Memoir of Robert Chambers," besides contributing freely to the Journal, and other of their serial publications.

Charles Knight was born at Windsor in the year 1791, and was the only child of his father, a bookseller and printer of some importance in that town, who, by his connection with the Microcosm, a paper conducted by Canning, and written by Hookham Frere, "Bobus" Smith, and other Etonians, had made many influential friends. The last number of this schoolboy journal appeared, however, four years before the birth of his son.

Charles was educated at the school of a Dr. Nicholas at Ealing, and his early avidity for reading had, he himself thinks, much to do with rendering his constitution weak and feeble. At the age of fourteen he signed indentures of apprenticeship to his father, and in 1812, when he attained his majority, he was sent up for a few weeks to London to undergo a short term of training in the office of the Globe