In 1804 Constable assumed as partner Alexander Gibson Hunter, of Blackness, and from that time the business was carried on under the title of Archibald Constable and Co. In the following year, 1805, he added to the list of his periodicals the Medical and Surgical Journal, a work projected in concert with Dr. Andrew Duncan, and which existed till 1855, when it was united to the Medical Journal of Science. It was in this year, also, that the firm published a poem, which was eventually to do more for the enlargement of their business and the honour of their name than even the famous Review itself.
Walter Scott, as we have seen, while still unknown to fame, had been a frequent visitor at Constable’s old book-shop. The publishers of the first edition of the Lay of the Last Minstrel were Longman and Co. of London, and Archibald Constable and Co. of Edinburgh; the latter firm taking but a small venture in the risk. The profit was to be divided equally between the author and the publishers, and Scott’s portion amounted to £169 6s. Longman, when a second edition was called for, offered £500 for the copyright, which was immediately accepted, but they afterwards added, as the Introduction says, “£100 in their own unsolicited kindness.” In the history of British poetry nothing had ever equalled the demand for the Lay of the Last Minstrel. 44,000 copies were disposed of before Scott superintended the edition of 1830, to which the biographical introductions were prefixed.
In the ensuing year Constable issued a beautiful edition of what he termed Works of Walter Scott, Esq., comprising the poem just mentioned, the “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,” “Sir Tristram,” and a series of “Lyrical Ballads.”
In 1806 it was rumoured that Scott had a new poem in hand. Longman at once opened negotiation as to its purchase, but in vain; and in a short time the London publishers heard with a feeling of jealousy, not unmixed with honest amazement, that Constable had offered one thousand guineas for a poem which had not yet been completed, and of which he had not even seen the scheme.
It may be gathered from the Introduction of 1830 that private circumstances of a delicate nature rendered it desirable for Scott to obtain the immediate command of such a sum; the price was actually paid long before the poem was published; and it suited well with Constable’s character to imagine that his readiness to advance the money may have outstripped the calculations of more experienced dealers.
The bargain having, however, been concluded he was too wary to keep the venture entirely to himself, and he consequently tendered one-fourth of the copyright to Mr. Miller of Albemarle Street, and to Mr. Murray, then of Fleet Street, London, and in both cases the offer was eagerly accepted.
Marmion, the poem in question, which had been announced by an advertisement in 1857, as Six Epistles from Ettrick Forest, met with an immense success, and 2000 copies, at a guinea and a half each, were disposed of in less than a month.
As an instance of the freedom Constable left to Jeffrey in the conduct of the Review, we are not a little astonished to read that the venture, in which he had risked so much, was attacked in a most slashing manner in his own journal. Jeffrey, thinking nothing of so ordinary a circumstance, sent the article to Scott with a note stating that he would come to dinner on the following Tuesday. Scott, though wounded by the tone of the Review, did his best to conceal it. Mrs. Scott, however, was very cool in her manner, and, as Jeffrey was taking leave, could no longer restrain her pique, and in her broken English—“Well, guid night, Mr. Jeffrey; dey tell me you have abused Scott in the Review; and I hope Mr. Constable has paid you well for writing it.” This anecdote, insignificant in itself, prepares us to some extent for the coldness between them, which led Scott to originate the Quarterly Review.
Emboldened still further by the success of Marmion, Constable now engaged Scott to edit the works of Swift, and as Scott had several like engagements on hand—he held, in fact, five separate agreements at the same time, for the London publishers—offered him £1500 for his new undertaking.
Constable was at this time in an apparently assured line of success. Though of a very sanguine nature—a quality without which no projector could possibly succeed—he was one of the most sagacious persons who ever followed his profession. A brother poet of Scott says of him: “Our butteracious friend turns up a deep draw-well;” and another eminent writer still more intimately connected had already christened him “the Crafty”—a title which, of all the flying burrs, was the one that stuck the firmest. His fair and handsome physiognomy was marked by an unmistakable and bland astuteness of expression. He generally avoided criticism as well as authorship, both being out of his “proper line.”