ptuous editions of travels and books of
costly engraving issued from Murray's press. The taste of the time has
changed. Collections of books have been superseded, as a fashion, by
collections of pictures, and the circulating library encourages the
habit of reading books without buying them. Cheap bookselling, the
characteristic of the age, has been promoted by the removal of the tax
on paper, and by the fact that paper can now be manufactured out of
refuse at a very low cost. This cheapness, the ideal condition for which
Charles Knight sighed, has been accompanied by a distinct deterioration
in the taste and industry of the general reader. The multiplication of
reviews, magazines, manuals, and abstracts has impaired the love of, and
perhaps the capacity for, study, research, and scholarship on which the
general quality of literature must depend. Books, and even knowledge,
like other commodities, may, in proportion to the ease with which they
are obtained, lose at once both their external value and their intrinsic
merit.

Murray's professional success is sufficient evidence of the extent of
his intellectual powers. The foregoing Memoir has confined itself almost
exclusively to an account of his life as a publisher, and it has been
left to the reader's imagination to divine from a few glimpses how much
of this success was due to force of character and a rare combination of
personal qualities. A few concluding words on this point may not be
inappropriate.

Quick-tempered and impulsive, he was at the same time warm-hearted and
generous to a fault, while a genuine sense of humour, which constantly
shows itself in his letters, saved him many a time from those troubles
into which the hasty often fall. "I wish," wrote George Borrow, within a
short time of the publisher's death, "that all the world were as gay as
he."

He was in some respects indolent, and not infrequently caused serious
misunderstandings by his neglect to answer letters; but when he did
apply himself to work, he achieved results more solid than most of his
compeers. He had, moreover, a wonderful power of attraction, and both in
his conversation and correspondence possessed a gift of felicitous
expression which rarely failed to arouse a sympathetic response in those
whom he addressed. Throughout "the trade" he was beloved, and he rarely
lost a friend among those who had come within his personal influence.

He was eager to look for, and quick to discern, any