Alfred Gilbert, besides being one of our most accomplished sculptors, deserves the praise of having rescued the goldsmith's art from degradation by his fine artistic sense and high imaginative gifts. And we may here remind our readers that two of our leading painters, finding one form of art inadequate to express all their ideas, have turned their attention to sculpture, and produced noble work in this direction. Leighton's bronzes of the Sluggard, and of the Athlete struggling with the Python, are among the finest groups of statuary which adorn the new Gallery at Millbank, and Mr. G. F. Watts's colossal statue of Physical Energy-the rider mounted on the horse which he has tamed, and shading his eyes from the sun as he looks out on the world in search of new conquests-is rapidly approaching completion and will soon, we hope, occupy a prominent place in one of the public squares or parks of London.

So, in varied and manifold ways, the same enormous activity, the same vast amount of intellectual and imaginative force, bears witness to the renewed vitality of Art in England. If much bad work as well as good is produced, this is only the inevitable result of so wide-spread and general a revival. It may be doubtful, as Mr. Hamerton wrote some years ago, whether the national mind has turned to Art from the pure love of it.' The conditions of modern life, it must be owned, are not as a whole favourable to the development of the higher branches of art, and except in a few rare instances, the finest thought of the age seeks expression in other forms. The day to which William Morris looked forward may still be far distant, when every artisan will become an artist, and intelligent work will rise gradually into imaginative work. But a great step in the right direction has been taken. The prejudices of our Puritan forefathers, which so long hampered the natural growth and expansion of Art, have been at length dispelled. The doors of the prison-house have been thrown open, and light and air have streamed freely in. Art is once more recognized as the flower of life and the crown of human labour. As a nation we have learnt to understand the elevating and life-giving power of Beauty, and to believe, with Mr. Ruskin, that

so far from Art being immoral, in the ultimate power of it, nothing but Art is moral; that Life without Industry is Sin, and Industry without Art brutality; . . . that the knowledge of what is beautiful leads on and is the first step to the knowledge of the things which are lovely and of good report; and that the laws, the life, and the joy of Beauty, in the material world of God, are as eternal and sacred parts of His creation as, in the world of spirits, virtue; and in the world of Angels, praise.'

ART.

ART. X.-Annals of a Publishing House.

William Blackwood and his Sons. Their Magazine and Friends. By Mrs. Oliphant. Edinburgh and London, 1897.

L'

ET us say at once upon the threshold that this is one of the best books of its class which we have ever had the pleasure of reading. It is the history of a long literary fight, exhibiting all the daring exploits and fluctuating fortunes of real warfare. Its human interest is therefore exceptionally great; and though faults and mistakes are to be found in it, and particular incidents may not be seen by ourselves as Mrs. Oliphant saw them, such errors, as they seem to us, detract nothing from the charm of the book as an exciting narrative, or from its value as a brilliant contribution to the annals of Periodical Literature. If Mrs. Oliphant is sometimes a little too diffuse, a fault which she shares in common with the majority of modern biographers, she brings us into contact with so many illustrious names, and so many attractive and eccentric characters, that nobody, on the whole, will grudge the space devoted to them and if she deals a little too freely in small sarcasms, Mrs. Oliphant was a lady, and may claim a lady's privilege. She may have thought, perhaps, that in writing the history of Maga' she was bound to don the garb of the satirist, as Johnson, when he became a frequenter of the green-room, thought it right to wear a gold-laced waistcoat.

With these remarks our task of criticism, so far as concerns the manner of the work, is ended, and we gladly pass on to the subject matter, of which much will be new to the public, while of that which is not, some part, at all events, still retains its old attractions. All that we have to add is that in the discussion of business transactions we shall occasionally have to remind our readers that there are two sides to every story.

The two revolutions which marked the close of the eighteenth century, the literary revolution in England, and the political Revolution in France, produced an effect upon the public mind after the long repose which had preceded them, such as living men can only faintly picture to themselves from the conversation of their fathers and grandfathers. It has been described too often and too recently to justify our dwelling on it now. But Mrs. Oliphant points out to us that in the world of literature it created a species of excitement and speculation which may almost be compared longo intervallo with the railway mania of 1845. This was especially visible in Edinburgh. The marvellous popularity of Scott and Byron, the offspring by two different mothers of the same revolution, seemed to indi

cate

cate for the first time the possibility of large fortunes being made by literature. Every bookseller was on the look-out for a genius and large sums were sometimes lavished on worthless writers by the sanguine bibliopole who saw in their maudlin effusions the promise of a new Childe Harold.' But literature and all connected with it rose and flourished in this new atmosphere. The change had begun, as Lord Macaulay says, when the Literary Club was founded. But it was not completed till the following century, when the new golden age really set in. Literature became more widely popular. Authors were more richly remunerated. Booksellers became publishers, and publishers became capitalists.

The founder of the House of Blackwood entered into business just at the right moment to take advantage of the rising gale. But unlike most of his contemporaries he avoided the error of carrying too much sail, and was the only man, according to Mrs. Oliphant, who emerged from the publishing speculations of that era without burning his fingers. The Blackwoods were a family of old Scottish gentry, a branch of which took to business and settled in Edinburgh, where at the close of the seventeenth century the immediate ancestor of William Blackwood, the founder of Maga,' was an opulent burgess. He lost all his fortune, however, in the Darien Company; and then ensues a gap in the family history down to the birth of William, the subject of this memoir, in 1776. His father, of whom we hear nothing, seems to have left his family in comfortable circumstances, or at all events above poverty, and his three sons lived at home with their mother till they went out into the world to make their own way. Of William Blackwood's education nothing is told us; but it is to be presumed that he had the ordinary schooling of a boy of his class in Scotland, which is likely to have been better than it was at that time in England. At the age fourteen he was apprenticed to a firm of booksellers, Messrs. Bell and Bradfute, whose premises were in Parliament Square. It is conjectured that while in this situation the young Blackwood may, like Sir Walter Scott, have been unconsciously making himself.' The shop was frequented by the judges and advocates of the Law Courts, and the professors from the College. And Mrs. Oliphant pictures to herself the young apprentice listening attentively to their remarks on new publications, and thus acquiring some insight into the secret of literary popularity which, of all knowledge, is the most useful to a publisher.

of

As soon as he was out of his apprenticeship, he was engaged by a publishing firm in Edinburgh to superintend a branch

business

business at Glasgow. This was the firm of Mundell and Co., who about this time were publishing Campbell's Pleasures of Hope,' for which the remuneration of the Poet was fifty copies of the work; but we do not know whether young Blackwood himself was in any way answerable for this arrangement. While at Glasgow it seems probable that he attended lectures at the University, and made some acquaintance with the higher literature. But his taste for book-hunting was now developing itself, and he writes to Constable in Edinburgh informing him that he has got some curious blackletter works for sale, and asking what Constable will give for them. From these beginnings it was an easy step to setting up on his own account as a secondhand and antiquarian bookseller, which he did soon afterwards, having first spent three years in a London establishment, Mr. Cuthill's, where he learned especially the art of cataloguing, an occupation which, as it is principally concerned with old books, ministered to Blackwood's natural propensities, and confirmed him in the views with which he had quitted Glasgow.

It was in 1804, when William Blackwood had not quite completed his twenty-eighth year, that he settled at Edinburgh and set up an establishment of his own on the South Bridge exactly opposite the College, where he carried on for several years the business of a secondhand bookseller, undertaking at the same time the arrangement and valuation of private libraries. In the following year he married Miss Steuart, and the House of Blackwood commenced its career.

And here for a moment we must leave him to take a glance at the world in which he found himself and the state of literature and society in Edinburgh at the opening of the present century. The two were more closely connected in the capital of Scotland than they ever have been in London. In Major Pendennis's time begad, poetry and genius and that sort of thing were devilish disreputable.' And Pendennis's time went back to the days of the Regency. But in Edinburgh, only a few years earlier, 'society' was something totally different, in which Matthew Arnold would not have looked in vain for his combination of sweetness and light. It has been described by Lockhart in Peter's Letters,' by Cockburn in his Life of Jeffrey,' and by Mrs. Fletcher in her charming 'Reminiscences,' in colours to which little can be added. It consisted of three elements-law, letters, and aristocracy, which mingled together on a footing of perfect equality and constituted an upper class. Some of the old families continued to reside in Edinburgh after the Union, and English families belonging to the

northern

northern counties fell into the habit of wintering at Edinburgh instead of at York. The two combined to preserve, in the mixed circle of which they were the ornaments, the tastes and habits of the ancient régime. The Edinburgh Professoriate contributed by itself a group of men of science and culture which has never been surpassed, if ever equalled, at any one time in any capital of Europe. The judges and advocates of the Parliament House, who were often, perhaps generally, men of letters as well, furnished a robuster ingredient, seasoned with wit and humour of no ordinary quality. We have often observed that the notes of introduction which Mr. Pleydell writes for Colonel Mannering are all addressed to men of intellectual eminence. Now Colonel Mannering was a soldier and a man of family, and had the aristocratic section of Edinburgh society enjoyed any social superiority over the other two, it would have been natural for Pleydell to have introduced Mannering to some of the families composing it. That Scott did not represent him as doing so is some evidence of the high estimation in which literature was then held in modern Athens, even if it does not imply that in some respects it took precedence of birth unless accompanied by other claims to recognition. Into this society William Blackwood, when he set up in business in 1804, had still to enter; he had still, according to Lockhart, to learn what the best society always teaches, tact, reserve, and self-restraint. The want of these qualities may be little drawback to a man while he is fighting his way, and getting on, so to speak, by the weight of his foot. But as soon as he has acquired a good position, and what has been gained by one kind of talent has to be kept by another, he is placed at some disadvantage by the want of this social education. It will be seen as we proceed that William Blackwood did suffer from it, and we are led to admire all the more the sterling qualities -the courage, the strong character, and the sound judgmentwhich conducted him to victory in spite of it.

From the year 1804 to 1817 completes one stage in the history of the House of Blackwood. During this period the foundations of the great Scottish firm were securely laid; and at the expiration of it William Blackwood felt himself in a position to take a further step in advance along the path of literary enterprise. Thirteen years of no ordinary interest and importance had taught Blackwood much. They witnessed the dawn on the horizon of the two great luminaries, Scott and Byron, the publication of 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel,' of 'Childe Harold,' and of Waverley.' They saw criticism and satire assume a new shape in the Edinburgh' and 'Quarterly'

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