Once a bookseller, Robert speedily found opportunity to become an author, and he undertook the editorship of a small weekly periodical called the _Kaleidoscope_; while his brother William, in order to do all the manual work connected with it, taught himself the art of printing, and with an old fount of type, and a clumsy wooden press, which he had purchased for three pounds, composed and worked off all the impressions; his own contributions, some of them poetical, “finding their way into the stick without the intervention of copy.” Here he was often seen, “a slim, light-eyed boy in his shirt-sleeves, tugging away with desperate energy at his old creaking press.” When his very small and imperfect fount was inadequate to the demand for larger letters, he would sit up, after his long day’s labour for half the night, carving the requisite capitals out of a piece of wood with his penknife. This first venture was necessarily short-lived, and died in the January of the year 1822--at which date they both gave up their bookstalls and took regular shops. Nothing daunted by the untimely fate of his first effort, Robert entered the field again, and from his connection with the Tweed, and with the assistance of friends from that quarter, who aided him in the identification of some of Scott’s characters, he produced a book that seemed likely to be popular--“Illustrations of the Author of Waverley,” consisting of descriptive sketches of the supposed originals of the great novelist. The book was a success, not so much from a pecuniary point of view, but as introducing the author to the kindly notice of several literary men, and gaining him the friendship of Scott, still the anonymous “Wizard of the North,” who mentions him in his diary as “a clever young fellow, but spoils himself by too much haste.”