• A PUBLISHER AND HIS FRIENDS.* THE history of a

great publishing house like that of Mr. Murray is in a large measure a record of English literature during the period of which it treats. The vanity as well as the glory of literature is exhibited in these pages. Some of the authors who were greatly popular, and acquired wealth as well as fame sixty years since, are now little read, if, indeed, they are read at all ; while others whose position was then uncertain, and whose books brought little payment to their authors, have won what appears to be a secure position in the Temple of Fame. There is scarcely a man or woman of mark in the literature of the first half of this century who was not directly or indirectly associated with the house of which the second John Murray—Byron's Murray—May be termed the founder. His father, indeed, had originally started the

A Publh11.0 r aNd Friunde. 14fooloir and Correspondence of the late John Murray, ‘,..ith an Account of the Origin and P reN.ase of the Howe 1708.1543. By Sarouel ithniles, LL.B. 2 vole. London : John Id vray 1551,

business at 32 Fleet Street, but be was not particularly suc- cessful; he died young; and it is to the high courage, to the unstinting generosity, and to the moral rectitude as well as intellectual qualities of the second John Murray, that the business in Albemarle Street owes the position which it has ever since retained.

He began his business life before he was of age, by entering into partnership with Highley, his father's "faithful shop- man," a man of no enterprise, who was better qualified to sell books over the counter than to undertake the responsi- bilities of a publisher. John Murray was a man of different metal, and as soon as it was practicable dissolved the partner- ship ; and having drawn lots for the house, had the good fortune to remain where Le was, while Highley took another shop in the same street, and, to young Murray's indignation, advertised himself as successor to his father. One of Murray's earliest friends was Isaac D'Israeli, whose fame, once con- siderable, has been eclipsed by that of his son, and in him the youthful publisher found a valuable literary adviser.

Murray's ambition is seen from the outset of his career, and his high sense of honour is as remarkable as his enter- prising spirit. He became very early associated with Constable, the famous Edinburgh publisher whose name is familiar to every lover of Sir Walter Scott. He was, says Lockhart, one of the most sagacious persons that ever fol- lowed his profession ; but he hated accounts, and, as Murray afterwards found, was too fond of accommodation-bills to be a safe pan to deal with. The establishment of the Edinburgh Review in 1802 made Constable's name a power in the pub- lishing world, and when he produced Scott's Sir Tristrem, and his Lay, Murray acted as an agent for the sale in London, while Constable undertook the same office for his books in the Northern capital. A disagreement between Constable's house and Longman's, which Murray did his utmost to remove, led to a closer temporary connection with the former, and the Fleet Street publisher found it necessary, both for purposes of business and also of love-making, to pay more than one visit to Edinburgh. Both his undertakings were successful, but in the Life of Constable we read that the society of hard drinkers into which he was introduced proved no slight trial. He was taken to Brechin Castle, where it seemed to be the first duty of the guests to see which of theui could drink the most ; and at every house he visited, drinking appears to have been the order of the day. A fourth part in the share of Marmion was one fruit of the connection with Constable, and it may be observed here that the way in which years afterwards that share was presented to Scott, shows a gentlemanly feeling on the part of Murray that was charac- teristic of him throughout life.

Mrs. Rundell's Domestic Cookery was one of his 'earliest successes ; the road to fame, and to wealth also, was thrown open by the conception and publication of the Quarterly Review, In the autumn of 1807, Murray wrote to Canning, who was then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, sug- gesting that the "radically bad" principles of the Edinburgh Review, then in its sixth year, should be counteracted by a journal of better principles and of equal power. The result of this letter was the introduction of Gifford to Murray, through the Secretary's cousin, Stratford Canning. Several consultations followed, but no active steps were taken until Murray in the following autumn visited Scott at Ashestiel. He could not have chosen a better moment, for Scott was irritated by Jeffrey's recent review of his Marrnion, and so disgusted with an article in the Edinburgh on the state of affairs in Spain, that he wrote to Constable demanding that his name should be taken off the list of subscribers. Into the new project, therefore, he entered with his wonted energy, and wrote a long letter to Gifford with regard te the proposed editorship. In this letter, Scott speaks of Murray as a "young bookseller with capital and enterprise, and with more good sense and propriety of sentiment than fall to the share of most of the trade ;" and adds, " I thought his ideas were most liberal and satisfactory." Murray afterwards became one of Gifford's warmest friends ; but at first the ship seemed not unlikely to founder with such a captain at the helm, and for many a day Gifford's habits of procrastination were a thorn in the side of Murray. He was the most unpunctual of editors. The earliest number of the Quarterly Review was published in February, 809, and the publisher, who had invented £5,000

the undertaking, had much to make him anxious at first. "If I am over-anxious," he writes, a year later, to Gifford, "it is because I have let my hopes of fame as a bookseller rest upon the establishment and celebrity of this journal. My character, as well with my professional brethren as with the public, is at stake upon it ; for I would not be thought silly by the one, or a mere speculator by the other." Murray, who had an instinctive dislike of personalities, whether in social life or in literature, objected to Gifford's attacks on the Edinburgh. "This, he held, was not the way in which a respectable periodical should be conducted. It had a line of its own to pursue, without attacking its neighbours. 'Publish,' he said, the beet in- formation, the best science, the best literature ; and leave the public to decide for themselves,' "—advice that might be fre- quently applied with advantage in our day. One sound rule of the Quarterly was, that every contribution should be paid for, and to this rule no exception was made. Ten guineas a sheet was the ordinary payment, and it satisfied Scott ; but Southey received twenty for the famous Nelson article which appeared in the fifth number, and from henceforth he was, as Gifford said, the sheet-anchor of the Review. Scott also con- tributed many a delightful essay, and his friend George Ellis, with whom Canning sometimes worked in concert, was a tower of strength. Croker was also a constant contributor, and in later days, when Gifford was laid aside by illness, frequently took charge of the Review. His notion of its scope was limited, and he thought it ought not to be made a political engine. "I have more than once hinted," he wrote, "that neither politics nor trifles can make a sufficient substratum and foundation— solid literature and science must be the substance—the rest is leather and prunella." Croker, by-the-way, was a far abler man of letters than a reader would judge who knows him only through the pages of his arch-enemy, Lord Macaulay ; but, like Macaulay, he cherished strong prejudices, and in writing to Murray, observes that a man of Byron's birth and taste "can have nothing in common with such miserable creatures as we now call Radicals, of whom I know not that I can better express the illiterate and blind ignorance and vul- garity than by saying that the best informed of them have probably never heard of Lord Byron."

By degrees, and thanks in large measure to Murray's in- creasing vigilance, the prospects of the Quarterly brightened, and in 1811 be made his editor a present of £500. "I thank you," Gifford wrote somewhat curtly, "for your magnificent present ; but £500 is a vast sum. 'However, you know your own business." Gifford was painstaking to a fault in his editorial capacity, and often held back the publication until an erasure or a torrection could be finally inserted. It was a very common occurrence for the Review to appear a month or six weeks after date, and in one year only two numbers were published. It is almost needless to say that when, in 1825, Lockhart accepted the management, the Quarterly was no longer in danger of suffering from its editor's procrastina- tion.

In 1812, Miller, who carried on business at 50 Albemarle Street, desired to retire from "the trade," and John Murray, having purchased his lease, copyrights, and stock, took possession of the house which has now for nearly eighty years been associated with his name. That house is connected with many a famous memory. Thither has come, at one time or another, through this long and eventful period, almost every man of high mark in literature or politics, in art or science; and few are the hosts in London who have welcomed more distinguished guests than the second John Murray and his son, the present venerable head of the house. The latter, by-the-way, remembers witnessing the first meeting of Byron and Scott in his father's drawing-room, and was strack as a boy by the sight of the two lame poets stumping together down the stairs. Murray probably owed even more of his success in life to his connection with Lord Byron than to the Review of which he was so justly proud. The poet's extraordinary fame made his publisher also famous, and Murray's lavish generosity brought several poets and scores of poetasters to his house. The amount paid to Byron was about £10,000; Crabbe received 23,000, inuelt to his astonishment, and the publisher lost pretty heavily on the venture; he offered Southey £1,000 for a poem he had not read, the sum which Constable, with a far better prospect of recouping himself, had previously offered under similar air- cumstances to Scott ; he gave Campbell £1,000 for his

Selections ; and 21,500 to Milman for three dramas, which Dr. Smiles mildly calls "a rather excessive price." Murray gained a high reputation by paying his authors royally, and his known generosity attracted also a number of impecunious persons who had small claims upon his purse. Byron's sister asked more than once for a loan, as she was "poverty's self."' Mrs. Shelley, "during her pressing necessities," applied to him for £100; he assisted Maturin, who, by-the-way, gained £1,000 for one of his tragedies, with several large gifts of money ; a certain Mr. Salim& having written a book, wanted a loan of £250; and another author, having sent an article to the Quarterly which was not accepted, "desired to have 216 in addition to what he had already borrowed as money on manuscripts deposited.'" It has been lately asserted that no publisher who understands his trade will lose money on a book. Murray understood it, if ever man did ; yet "woeful ex- perience" convinced him that not more than one publication in fifty has a sale sufficient to pay its expenses. Murray, it may be observed, said that every man has a book in him if one only knew how to extract it. It is a happy thing, perhaps, that one does not know how.

Mr. Murray's prominent position brought him into contact not only with the ablest men and women of the time, but also with some of the most eccentric. Of Frere, who was alike eccentric and able, a curious story is told by Murray in a letter to Lord Byron :—".A propos of Mr. Frere : he came to me while at breakfast this morning, and between some stanzas he was repeating to Inc of a truly original poem of his own, he said carelessly 'By-the-way, about half-an-hour ago I was so silly (taking an immense pinch of snuff and priming his nostrils with it) as to get married.'" He had, in fact, left his wife at the church in order to bring his poem to Murray. tigo Posoolo,- the well-known patriot, was one of the writers who received gifts from his publisher as well as payments. He was eccentric to an excess, and one of his troublesome eccentricities was a lavish expenditure and an accumulation of debts. He was born a racehorse, he said, and was compelled to draw a waggon, and after stating that he could not live on less than 2400 a year, he adds :—

"My apartments decently furnished encompass me with an atmosphere of ease and respectability, and I enjoy the illusion of

not having fallen into the lowest circumstances I always declare that 1 vvill die like a gentleman on a decent bed, surrounded by casts (as I cannot buy the marbles) of the Venuses, of the Apollos, and of the Graces, and the busts of great men; nay, even among flowers, and, if possible, with some graceful innocent girl playing

an old pianoforte in an adjoining room And since I must be buried in your country, I am happy in having insured for me the possession during the remains of my life of a cottage built after my plan, surrounded by flowering shrubs, almost within the turnpikes of the town, and yet as quiet as a country house, and open to the free air. Whenever I can freely dispose of elm I will also build a small dwelling for my corpse under a beautiful Oriental plane-tree, which I mean to plant next November and cultivate con more. So far I am indeed an epicure ; in all other things I am the most moderate of men."

The modest exile ends his letter by asking for the loan of 21,000, to be repaid in five years, he meanwhile writing articles for the Quarterly. Murray knew well that with such a sum in his pocket, Foscolo would neither write articles nor give lectures as be had been advised to do; but he paid his most pressing debts, and the Italian lived on credit to the end of his life, "surrounded by all that was luxurious and beautiful. How he contrived it no one knew, for his resources remained at the lowest ebb."

Another of Murray's authors was the eccentric and notorious Lady Caroline Lamb. He published her navels, with what success we are not told, and the lady writes to him without reticence as to her feelings for Lord Byron. Here is a dateless letter, written when her intercourse with the poet had ceased, though it is evident that Lady Caroline's penchant was not extinct :— " Yours quite disturbed my mind, for want of your telling me how he looks, what he says, if he is grown fat, if he is no uglier- than he used to be, if he is good-humoured or cross-grained, putting his brows down—if his hair curls or is straight, an somebody said, if he has seen Hobhouse, if he is going to stay long, if you went to Dover as you intended, and a great deal more, which if you had the smallest tact or aught else, you would have written long ago; for as to me I shall certainly not see him, neither do I care he should know that I ever asked after him. It is from mere curiosity I should like to hear all you cam tell me about him."

There is genuine feeling in the utterance of her grief after the poet's death :—

" 'Lord Byron's hearse,' she 'wrote to Murray, came by our gates yesterday. You may judge what I felt. Tell Hobhouse to see about my pictures and letters and drawings. I will do any- thing ho wishes about Lord Byron's letters. I am in no anxiety about my own; only you know they were the most imprudent possible, and for others sakes it were best to have them destroyed. . . . . . You may show this letter to Mrs. Leigh or Lady Byron, and tell them I am too ill to write myself. Lord Byron's death has made an impression on me which I cannot express. I am very sorry I over said one unkind word against him.'

The story of the famous Byron Memoirs, which were destroyed in the Albemarle Street drawing-room, is, of course, retold in these volumes. The present Mr. John Murray, then a youth of sixteen, was a witness of their destruction ; and it is interesting also to read that, when a student in Edinburgh, he had the good fortune to be present at the dinner which Sir Walter Scott made famous by acknowledging that he was "the sole and undivided author" of the Waverley Novels. "These two incidents, one of which occurred in 1824 and the other in 1827, carry us back a long way in the literary history of the century. Mr. Murray is the only man living who can recall both, The curious reader, as he travels through these volumes, will be struck, as we have already hinted, with the change in the taste of the public ; and the ease with which authors once beloved are thrust aside in favour of new acquaintances, is enough almost to make us believe with De Quincey that every age buries its own literature. The "Emperor of the West," as Murray was nicknamed, was a special friend of poets, who sought him out with a kind of instinct ; and a hard time he seems to have had with some of them. What a nest of singing-birds, and of birds, too, that could little more than chirp, must Murray have had under his charge, from Byron, with his powerful although inharmonious voice, to the enchanting music of Coleridge, and the compara- tively faint but pretty warblings of Mrs. Hemans. For solid and weighty prose works he was also always ready to treat, and so generous was he in his payment of books "worthy the reading," that instances are even recorded of authors who re- monstrated with him on his lavish liberality. It proved a wise expenditure in the end ; but Murray's career was by no means one of unbroken prosperity, and when urged on by the energy and enthusiasm of the future Lord Beaconsfield, then a young man of two-and-twenty, Murray started a daily paper which he hoped might prove a rival to the Times, he managed to lose £26,000 in six months. The Representative appears from its .earliest numbers to have had but a small chance of life. "It was badly organised," Dr. Smiles writes, "badly edited, and its oontents—leading articles, home and foreign news—were ill- balanced." A more luckless speculation could not have been made by a man of business ; but great as was the loss, it was borne with equanimity. Benjamin Disraeli failed in taking his share in the loss, and so also did another proprietor. Yet Murray could write to Sharon Turner :—

"Mr. Disraeli is totally wrong in supposing that my indigna- tion against his son arises in the smallest degree from the sum which I have lost by yielding to that son's unrelenting excite- ment and importunity; this loss, whilst it Was in weekly opera- tion, may be supposed, and naturally enough, to have been Su oiently painful ; but now that it has ceased, I solemnly declare that I neither care nor think about it, more than one does of the long-suffered agonies of an aching tooth the day after we have summoned resolution enough to have it extracted.'

The fullness of interesting detail contained in these volumes renders it impossible to do justice to them within the ordinary limits of a review. In some respects Dr. Smiles might have done his work better, and several superficial defects are obvious. He, however, must be a surly critic who will not overlook faults like these for the sake of the sterling qualities of a book which has demanded no small labour and much exercise of judgment on the part of the compiler. Readers who care for the literary history of the century will not be satisfied with borrowing these Memoirs of a distinguished man from the circulating library, but will be glad to have a copy on their shelves. The estimate of the late Mr. Murray by Mr. Courthope, with which the second volume closes, is altogether admirable. He was not only a man who succeeded by integrity and force of character in attaining an extraordinary position as a publisher, but he appears to have possessed a remarkable power of attraction, and to have won as much affection as esteem.