Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/432

392 592 THOMAS TEGG. lucrative, Tegg resolved to abandon the auctioneering portion of the business, and confine himself to the more legitimate trade ; and, at his last sale, he took upwards of eighty pounds. The purchase and sale of remainders, however, still formed a very important branch of his traffic. About this time he took another journey to Scot- land, and had an interview with Sir Walter Scott, who had, he says, " nothing in his manner or conversation to impress a visitor with his greatness." Immediately on his return he made his final remove to the Mansion House, Cheapside once the residence of the Lord Mayor and the annual current of sales rose in the proportion of from eighteen to twenty-two. Now a popular as well as a wealthy man, he was elected a Common Councillor of the Ward of Cheap, took a country house at Norwood, with a beautiful garden attached "though I scarcely knew a rose from a rhododendron " and set up a carriage. It was, of course, from the Mansion House that his well-known publications were dated. In 1825, the year after the purchase of the " Table Book," he published the " London Encyclopaedia ;" it was a time of great financial difficulty (as we have, indeed, seen in almost all our lives of contemporary publishers) ; his bills were dishonoured to the extent of twenty thousand pounds ; and the work was began solely to give employment to those who had been faithful in more prosperous years. The public, however, sup- ported the undertaking, and Tegg was rewarded for his courage. The time of the panic, in 1826, was a season of severe trial, in domestic as well as pecuniary matters ; and Tegg, though he maintained that few men were