Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/365

325 AND JAMES N2SBET. 325 violin. On reaching town he became clerk to a Mr. Hugh Usher, a West India merchant in Moorfields, and his salary commencing at $4 I2s. per annum took some years before it increased to 120. James Nisbet's career has been to a certain extent chronicled by his son-in-law, the Rev. J. A. Wallace, in a volume entitled, " Lessons from the Life of James Nisbet, the Publisher " not, says the author, " a mere biography " would that it were ! but a series of forty chapters or lessons, each commencing with a text and ending with a hymn. To its rambling and incoherent pages we are indebted, however, to many of the facts in the following notice. On the evening of Nisbet's arrival in London a young Scottish friend took him about sight-seeing. The walk terminated in a blind alley and a strange looking house which instinct at once told him was " the house of the destroyer." He gave up intercourse with his companion, and fled away hastily, and not till some few days afterwards, when he found a refuge in the Swallow Street Chapel., did he recover his equanimity. From his earliest boyhood he had a great liking for " the courts of the Lord ;" a pocket-book dated 1805, contains a list of places at which the gospel was reported to be purely preached. It seems, too, that his favourite books at this time were Henry's " Commentary," Cruden's " Concordance," Hall's " Contemplations/' and Baxter's " Saints' Rest." At the Swallow Street Chapel he met his future wife. As befitted a persevering and energetic man he was an early riser, yet he found that not only did his business require it, but he discovered "our Lord when on earth rising a great while before day that