Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/277

CHAMBERS, KNIGHT, AND CASSELL. 239 forward as in you. There, of course, I meet you in warm sympathy. I have sometimes thought of de- scribing my bitter painful youth to the world, as something in which it might read a lesson ; but the retrospect is still too distressing. I screen it from the mental eye. The one grand fact it has impressed is the very small amount of brotherly assistance there is for the unfortunate in this world. . . . Till I proved that I could help myself, no friend came to me. Uncles, cousins, &c., in good positions in life some of them stoops of kirks, by-the-by not one offered, nor seemed inclined to give, the smallest assistance. The consequent defying, self-relying spirit in which, at sixteen, I set out as a bookseller with only my own small collection of books as a stock not worth more than two pounds, I believe led to my being quickly independent of all aid ; but it has not been all a gain, for I am now sensible that my spirit of self-reliance too often manifested itself in an unsocial, unamiable light, while my recollections of ' honest poverty ' may have made me too eager to attain and secure worldly prosperity." This period of struggle, however, opened his heart in after-life to all who were battling in like circum- stances, for those who knew him well say that " many young literary men owed much to his help, for he was ever ready with kindly counsel as well as in more solid assistance when needed." It is pleasant to think that his little ciphering book, still in existence (the handwriting of which is extremely neat, so neat indeed that the young penman was employed by the civic authorities to engross on vellum the address presented to George IV. on his visit to Edinburgh in 1822), containing his first year's account of profit and