CHEAP LITERATURE.

CONSTABLE, CHAMBERS, KNIGHT, AND CASSELL.

ON a certain day in May, 1825 (so we read in Lockhart's "Life of Scott"), Archibald Constable, prince of the Edinburgh booksellers, and a man who by his energy and enterprise had well earned his surname of "The Crafty," paid a visit to Sir Walter Scott, at Abbotsford. Of all the many bold schemes he had entered on, the one he was now meditating was the boldest and most revolutionary. At the outset he startled Scott, and Lockhart and Ballantyne, who were present, by saying, "Literary genius may or may not have done its best; but printing and bookselling, as instruments of entertaining and enlightening mankind, and, of course, for making money, are as yet in mere infancy. Yes, the trade are in their cradle.” Scott eyed "The Crafty" with astonishment; Ballantyne regarded him with solemn stare. Thereupon Constable sucked in fresh inspiration, and proceeded to say, that wild as they might think his plans, they had been suggested by, and were in fact mainly grounded on, a sufficiently prosaic authority— namely, the annual schedule of assessed taxes, a copy of which he drew from his pocket and substituted for his D'Oyley. It was copiously diversified, text and margent, by figures and calculations in his own handwriting, which, says Lockhart, "I for one might have regarded with less reverence had I known at the time this great arithmetician's rooted aversion and contempt for all examination of his own balance-sheet."

When Constable went on to expound his plan it appeared very excellent and ingenious. He had taken vast pains to fill

in the number of persons who might fairly be supposed to pay the taxes for each separate article of luxury; and his conclusion was, that the immense majority of British families endowed with liberal fortunes had never yet conceived the remotest idea that their domestic arrangements were incomplete unless they expended some considerable sum annually upon the purchase of books. "Take," he said, "this one absurd and contemptible item of the tax upon hair-powder; the use of it is almost entirely gone out of fashion. Bating a few parsons' and lawyers' wigs, it may be said that hair-powder is confined to flunkeys, and, indeed, to the livery servants of great and splendid houses exclusively; nay, in many even of these it is already quite laid aside. Nevertheless, for each head that is. thus vilified in Great Britain a guinea is paid yearly to the Exchequer; and the taxes in that schedule are an army, compared to the purchasers of even the best and most popular books." He went on, Lockhart proceeds to say, in the same vein about armorial bearings, hunters, racers, and four-wheeled carriages; and, having demonstrated that hundreds of thousands in this magnificent country held, as necessary to their personal comfort and the maintenance of decent station, articles upon articles of costly elegance, of which their forefathers never dreamed, said that, on the whole, however usual it was to talk of the extended scale of literary transactions in modern days, our self-love never deceived us more grossly than when we fancied our notions in the matter of books had advanced in at all a corresponding proportion. "On the contrary," cried Constable, "I am satisfied that the demand for Shakspeare's plays, contemptible as we hold it to have been, in the time of Elizabeth and James, was more creditable to the classes who really indulged in any sort of elegance then, than the sale of 'Childe Harold' or 'Waverley,' triumphantly as people talk, is to the alleged expansion of taste and intelligence in this nineteenth century."

Here Scott interposed that he had at that moment a large valley, crowded with handsome houses, under his view, and yet

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he much doubted whether any laird within ten miles spent ten pounds per annum on the literature of the day-which he, of course, distinguished from its periodical press. "No," said Constable," there is no market among them that is worth one's while thinking about. They are contented with a review or a magazine, or at best with a paltry subscription to some circulating library forty miles off. But if I live for half a dozen

years, I'll make it as impossible that there should not be a good library in every decent house in Britain as that the shepherd's ingle-nook should want the salt-poke. Ay, and what's that?" he continued, warming and puffing. "Why should the ingle-nook itself want a shelf for the novels?" "I see your

drift, my man," said Scott; "you're for being like Billy Pitt in Gilray's print-you want to get into the salt-box yourself." "Yes," he responded. "I have hitherto been thinking only of the wax-lights, but before I'm a twelvemonth older I shall have my hand on the tallow." "Troth," said Scott, "you are indeed likely to be

"The great Napoleon of the realms of print.”

"If you outlive me," replied Constable, with a regal smile, "I bespeak that line for my tombstone; but in the mean time may I presume to ask you to be my right-hand man when I open my campaign of Marengo? I have now settled my outline of operations a three-shilling or half-crown volume every month, which must and shall sell, not by thousands or tens of thousands, but by hundreds of thousands-ay, by millions! Twelve volumes in the year, a half-penny of profit upon every copy of which will make me richer than the possession of all the copyrights of all the quartos that ever were or will be hot-pressed— twelve volumes, so good that millions must wish to have them, and so cheap that every butcher's callant may have them, if he pleases to let me tax him sixpence a week.”

Scott instantly saw that the scheme was a feasible one. "Your plan," he said, "cannot fail, provided the books are really good; but you must not start until you have not only