Blackwood’s shop is described by Lockhart as “the only great lounging shop in the new Town of Edinburgh”[52]. A glimpse of the soil and lights and shades which nourished “Maga” cannot help but bring a warmer, more familiar comprehension of its character and the words it spake. Just as Park Street and the Shaw Memorial and the grave portraits of its departed builders color our own _Atlantic Monthly_, just so did 17 Princes Street tinge and permeate the magazine which grew up in its precincts. “The length of vista presented to one on entering the shop”, says Lockhart, “has a very imposing effect; for it is carried back, room after room, through various gradations of light and shadow, till the eye cannot trace distinctly the outline of any object in the furthest distance. First, there is as usual, a spacious place set apart for retail-business, and a numerous detachment of young clerks and apprentices, to whose management that important department of the concern is intrusted. Then you have an elegant oval saloon, lighted from the roof, where various groupes of loungers and literary dilettanti are engaged in looking at, or criticising among themselves, the publications just arrived by that day’s coach from town. In such critical colloquies the voice of the bookseller himself may ever and anon be heard mingling the broad and unadulterated notes of its Auld Reekie music; for unless occupied in the recesses of the premises with some other business, it is here that he has his station.”[53] [52] J. G. Lockhart: _Peter’s Letters_, V. ii, p. 186 [53] Ibid., V. ii, p. 187