Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/491

449 PROVINCIAL BOOKSELLERS. 449 of learning ; too long had those geniuses that now began to shine been consealed in darkness for want of a proper channel to convey their productions into light ;" but in 1760 the northern geniuses were again " consealed in darkness," for the magazine came to an end. Four years later, however, Thomas Slack founded the Newcastle Chronicle, which has gone on continuously to the present day, being now one of the very best daily papers out of London. To its columns we are indebted for much of the preceding. Goading had continued his general publishing busi- ness with some energy, and in 1751 he issued Blener- hasset's " History of England " from the landing of the Phoenicians to the death of George I. and in his list of subscribers we find no less than eight Newcastle booksellers, one of whom was Martin Bryson, the friend and correspondent of Allan Ramsay, the Scotch poet and Edinburgh bookseller, who addressed a letter to him in rhyme " To Martin Bryson, on Tyne Brigg, An upright, downright, honest Whig. " Bryson's name occurs on a title-page as early as 1722. His house and stock were destroyed by the great New- castle fire of 1750, and after this occurrence he took, William Charnley, the son of a Penrith haberdasher and one of his many apprentices, into partnership. To diverge for a moment from this pedigree of bibliopoles, we come to by far the greatest name con- nected in any way with the production of books at Newcastle that, of course, of Thomas Bewick ; and though his life belongs more properly to the history of engraving, for many years the books that were illus- trated by his pencil gave the northern town such a