e fame of English literature.

Again, there was something, in the best sense of the word, aristocratic
in the position of literature itself. Patronage, indeed, had declined.
The patron of the early days of the century, who, like Halifax, sought
in the Universities or in the London Coffee-houses for literary talent
to strengthen the ranks of political party, had disappeared, together
with the later and inferior order of patron, who, after the manner of
Bubb Dodington, nattered his social pride by maintaining a retinue of
poetical clients at his country seat. The nobility themselves, absorbed
in politics or pleasure, cared far less for letters than their fathers
in the reigns of Anne and the first two Georges. Hence, as Johnson said,
the bookseller had become the Maecenas of the age; but not the
bookseller of Grub Street. To be a man of letters was no longer a
reproach. Johnson himself had been rewarded with a literary pension, and
the names of almost all the distinguished scholars of the latter part of
the eighteenth century--Warburton, the two Wartons, Lowth, Burke, Hume,
Gibbon, Robertson--belong to men who either by birth or merit were in a
position which rendered them independent of literature as a source of
livelihood. The author influenced the public rather than the public the
author, while the part of the bookseller was restricted to introducing
and distributing to society the works which the scholar had designed.

Naturally enough, from such conditions arose a highly aristocratic
standard of taste. The centre of literary judgment passed from the
half-democratic society of the Coffee-house to the dining-room of
scholars like Cambridge or Beauclerk; and opinion, formed from the
brilliant conversation at such gatherings as the Literary Club;
afterwards circulated among the public either in the treatises of
individual critics, or in the pages of the two leading Monthly Reviews.
The society from which it proceeded, though not in the strict sense of
the word fashionable, was eminently refined and widely representative;
it included the politician, the clergyman, the artist, the connoisseur,
and was permeated with the necessary leaven of feminine intuition,
ranging from the observation of Miss Burney or the vivacity of Mrs.
Thrale, to the stately morality of Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Hannah More.

On the other hand, the whole period of Murray's life as a publisher,
extending, to speak broadly, from the first French Revoluti