Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/293

253 CHAMBERS, KNIGHT, AND CASSELL. 253 One day, shortly after this, coming back jaded and weary from his London office he found two Eton lads W. M. Praed and Walter Blunt waiting at his cottage with an eager proposal that he should publish an Eton miscellany. Generously and sympatheti- cally did Mr. Knight enter into the schemes of the schoolboys ; and the plan of the Etonian was forth- with drawn up. Knight found much pleasure in watching and assisting the young periodical, which was a kind of pleasant nursery ground for the growth and display of the youthful talent of which Eton then proudly and unwontedly boasted. "It was refresh- ing," he writes, " after the dry labours of his day in town, to watch the bright, earnest, happy face of Mr. Blunt, who took a manifest delight in doing the editorial drudgery ; the worst proofs (for in the haste unavoidable in periodical literature he w r ould some- times catch hold of a proof ?i#read) never disturbed the serenity of his temper. To him it seemed a real happiness to stand at a desk in the composing-room." But Praed it was, with his sparkling wit, his elegant aptness of expression, and his boyish gallantry that yet smacked of the wise experience of age, who was the life and soul of the project, and his contributions eventually occupied fully one-fourth of the whole miscellany, and when he went to Cambridge it was thought advisable, perhaps found necessary, to termi- nate the Etonian altogether. Still Mr. Knight's chief hopes as a publisher were centred in the pro- mise of his young Eton friends, and during a week passed with them at Cambridge the general plan of Knighfs Quarterly Magazine was settled, and he was introduced to Derwent, Coleridge, Maiden, and Macaulay, afterwards his chief contributors.