f power to
appreciate character, remarkable in so young a man, that Disraeli
should, after all that had passed between them, have approached Murray
in his capacity of publisher with complete confidence. He knew that he
was dealing with a man at once shrewd and magnanimous, and he gave him
credit for understanding how to estimate his professional interest apart
from his sense of private injury.

Perhaps his most distinguishing characteristic as a publisher was his
unfeigned love of literature for its own sake. His almost romantic
admiration for genius and its productions raised him above the
atmosphere of petty calculation. Not unfrequently it of course led him
into commercial mistakes, and in his purchase of Crabbe's "Tales" he
found to his cost that his enthusiastic appreciation of that author's
works and the magnificence of his dealings with him were not the measure
of the public taste. Yet disappointments of this kind in no way
embittered his temper, or affected the liberality with which he treated
writers like Washington Irving, of whose powers he had himself once
formed a high conception. The mere love of money indeed was never an
absorbing motive in Murray's commercial career, otherwise it is certain
that his course in the suppression of Byron's Memoirs would have been
something very different to that which he actually pursued. On the
perfect letter which he wrote to Scott, presenting him with his fourth
share in "Marmion," the best comment is the equally admirable letter in
which Scott returned his thanks. The grandeur--for that seems the
appropriate word--of his dealings with men of high genius, is seen in
his payments to Byron, while his confidence in the solid value of
literary excellence appears from the fact that, when the _Quarterly_ was
not paying its expenses, he gave Southey for his "Life of Nelson" double
the usual rate of remuneration. No doubt his lavish generosity was
politic as well as splendid. This, and the prestige which he obtained as
Byron's publisher, naturally drew to him all that was vigorous and
original in the intellect of the day, so that there was a general desire
among young authors to be introduced to the public under his auspices.
The relations between author and publisher which had prevailed in the
eighteenth century were, in his case, curiously inverted, and, in the
place of a solitary scholar like Johnson, surrounded by an association
of booksellers, the drawing-room of Murray now