Ever since the days of Allan Ramsay, an Athenian bookseller has been a sort of oracle; and, as the tribe have increased, their oracular powers have become rich and varied. Constable, to whom, by the way, the literary world is as much indebted as to any man living, and who is a remarkable instance of success against the whole current of Athenian prejudice and opposition, has indeed too much sense, as well as too much business, for lounging and lecturing in a public shop; but even Constable is obliged occasionally to submit to the contact of that chaos of philosophic fragments, which, like the atoms of Epicurus, reel and wrangle on the benches by his counter. Blackwood too has a sort of den; but still, when there is nobody in it to gossip, you find his hard face poking out at his shop-door, just as the tongue of a church-bell pokes out at the mouth of that instrument of noise and brass. Manners and Miller--one who is said to be the only genuine species of the nightingale north of the Tweed, keeps a saloon for the accommodation of the Edinburgh blue stockings, in which sins, and sentiments, and silks, are, by turns, expatiated upon, in a style and manner which are truly Athenian. Not far from the Tron Kirk, there is perhaps the most wonderful of them all,--the Œdipus of all mysteries and riddles, as touching law, and learning, and politics--to the junior clerks who attend the parliament-house; the fag end of the Athenian company of comedians, and of the satellites of opposition in Athenian politics. Œdipus believes that the whole world rests upon his shoulders; and, whether he be haranguing from behind his counter, or trotting along the street, he is constantly hitching up his shoulders as if he were alarmed lest that world should go off its poise. But to see this little man in the zenith of his glory, you must see him in the parliament-house, where he is regularly found, as soon as the clerks have gone to the desk, and the players to the rehearsal, running about with so much eagerness and appearance of wisdom, that, until he speaks, you would mistake him for Jeffery, or rather for Henry Cockburn, to whom he has one similitude--that of a naked poll. As he has previously argued or decided every cause that can come before any of the courts, he comes, not to profit by the wisdom of the more express organs of the law, but to tell how far they deflect from the right, by swerving from his institutes. Each bookseller has, not only his levee as well-attended as ever that of Sir Richard Phillips in his glory was by ten-shilling-a-sheet overpaid authors, but his evening party, in which he shines. Thus Constable dines with deep-going politicians, Blackwood frequents prayer-meetings, Manners and Miller whistle,--this one associates with fiddlers, and that takes the unprotected females under the folds of his calf-skin mantle.