very easy a way as by lounging for half-an-hour in a bookseller's shop. It is in a city what the barber's shop is in a village-the centre and focus of all information concerning the affairs of men-the arena for all disputation-the stage for all display. It is there that the sybil Fame sits scattering her oracular leaves to all the winds of Heaven; but I cannot add with the poet,

"Umile in tanta gloria,

Coverta gia dello profetico nembo."

The bookseller is the confidant of his customers-he is the first to hear the rumour of the morning, and he watches it through all the stages of its swelling, till it bursts in the evening. He knows Mr's opinion of Lord's speech, sooner than any man in town. He has the best information upon all the in futuros of the world of letters; he has already had one or two peeps of the first canto of a poem not yet advertised-he has a proof-sheet of the next new novel in his pocket; and if you will but promise to be discreet, you may "walk backwards," or "walk up stairs for a moment," and he will shew it you. Are these things of no value? They may seem so to you among the green hills of Cardigan; but they are very much the reverse

to me among the dusty streets of London-or here in Edinburgh. I do love, from my soul, to catch even the droppings of the precious cup of knowledge.

To read books when they are upon every table, and to talk of them when nobody is silent about them, are rather vulgar accomplishments, and objects of vulgar ambition. I like to be beforehand with the world-I like both to see sooner and to see farther than my neighbours. While others are contented to sit in the pit, and gape and listen in wonder upon whatever is shewn or uttered, I cannot be satisfied unless I am permitted to go behind the scenes-to see the actors before they walk upon the stage, and examine the machinery of the thunder before its springs are set in motion.

In my next I shall introduce you to the Bookseller's shops of Edinburgh.

P. M.

174

LETTER XLIII.

TO THE SAME.

DEAR WILLIAMS,

THE importance of the Whigs in Edinburgh, and the Edinburgh Review, added to the great enterprize and extensive general business of Mr Constable, have, as might have been expected, rendered the shop of this bookseller by far the most busy scene in the Bibliopolic world of the North. It is situated in the High-Street, in the midst of the Old Town, where, indeed, the greater part of the Edinburgh Booksellers are still to be found lingering (as the majority of their London brethren also do,) in the neighbourhood of the same old haunts to which long custom has attached their predilections. On entering, one sees a place by no means answering, either in point of dimensions, or in point of ornament, to the no

tion one might have been apt to form of the shop from which so many mighty works are every day issuing a low dusky chamber, inhabited by a few clerks, and lined with an assortment of unbound books and stationery-entirely devoid of all those luxurious attractions of sofas and sofa-tables, and books of prints, &c. &c., which one meets with in the superb nursery of the Quarterly Review in Albemarle-Street. The Bookseller himself is seldom to be seen in this part of his premises; he prefers to sit in a chamber immediately above, where he can proceed in his own work without being disturbed by the incessant cackle of the young Whigs who lounge below; and where few casual visitors are ad, mitted to enter his presence, except the more important members of the great Whig corporation-Reviewers either in esse, or, at least, supposed to be so in posse-contributors to the Supplement of the Encyclopædia Britannica-and the more obscure editors and supporters of the innumerable and more obscure periodical works, of which Mr Constable is the publisher. The bookseller is himself a good-looking man, apparently about forty-very fat in his person, but with a face with good lines, and a fine healthy

complexion. He is one of the most jolly-looking members of the trade I ever saw; and moreover, one of the most pleasing and courtly in his address. One thing that is remarkable about him, and indeed very distinguishingly so, is—his total want of that sort of critical jabber, of which most of his brethren are so profuse, and of which custom has rendered me rather fond than otherwise. Mr Constable is too much of a bookseller, to think it at all necessary that he should appear to be knowing in the merits of books. His business is to publish books, and to sell them; he leaves the work of examining them before they are published, and criticizing them afterwards, to others, who have more leisure on their hands than he has. One sees in a moment that he has reduced his business to a most strictly businesslike regularity of system; and that of this the usual cant of book-shop disquisition forms no part-like a great wholesale merchant, who does not by any means think it necessary to be the taster of his own wines. I am of opinion, that this may, perhaps, be in the end the wisest course a great publisher can pursue. Here, at least, is one sufficiently striking instance of its

success.