“Your present offer is a favour which I would accept from you, if I accepted such from any man ...  The circumstances which induce me to part with my books, though sufficiently, are not immediately, pressing.  I have made up my mind to this, and there’s an end.  Had I been disposed to trespass upon your kindness in this way, it would have been before now; but I am not sorry to have an opportunity of declining it, as it sets my opinion of you, and indeed of human nature, in a different light from that in which I have been accustomed to consider it.”

Meanwhile Lord Byron had completed his “Siege of Corinth” and “Parisina,” and sent the packet containing them to Mr. Murray.  They had been copied in the legible hand of Lady Byron.  On receiving the poems Mr. Murray wrote to Lord Byron as follows: 

John Murray to Lord Byron.

December, 1815.

My Lord,

I tore open the packet you sent me, and have found in it a Pearl.  It is very interesting, pathetic, beautiful—­do you know, I would almost say moral.  I am really writing to you before the billows of the passions you excited have subsided.  I have been most agreeably disappointed (a word I cannot associate with the poem) at the story, which—­what you hinted to me and wrote—­had alarmed me; and I should not have read it aloud to my wife if my eye had not traced the delicate hand that transcribed it.

Mr. Murray enclosed to Lord Byron two notes, amounting to a thousand guineas, for the copyright of the poems, but Lord Byron refused the notes, declaring that the sum was too great.

“Your offer,” he answered (January 3, 1816), “is liberal in the extreme, and much more than the poems can possibly be worth; but I cannot accept it, and will not.  You are most welcome to them as additions to the collected volumes, without any demand or expectation on my part whatever....  I am very glad that the handwriting was a favourable omen of the morale of the piece; but you must not trust to that, as my copyist would write out anything I desired in all the ignorance of innocence—­I hope, however, in this instance, with no great peril to either.”

The money, therefore, which Murray thought the copyright of the “Siege of Corinth” and “Parisina” was worth, remained untouched in the publisher’s hands.  It was afterwards suggested, by Mr. Rogers and Sir James Mackintosh, to Lord Byron, that a portion of it (L600) might be applied to the relief of Mr. Godwin, the author of “An Enquiry into Political Justice,” who was then in difficulties; and Lord Byron himself proposed that the remainder should be divided between Mr. Maturin and Mr. Coleridge.  This proposal caused the deepest vexation to Mr. Murray, who made the following remonstrance against such a proceeding.

John Murray to Lord Byron.

ALBEMARLE STREET, Monday, 4 o’clock.

My Lord,