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 Revolution to almost the eve of the French Revolution of 1848, was characterized in a marked degree by the advance of Democracy.  In all directions there was an uprising of the spirit of individual liberty against the prescriptions of established authority.  In Politics the tendency is apparent in the progress of the Reform movement.  In Commerce it was marked by the inauguration of the Free Trade movement.  In Literature it made itself felt in the great outburst of poetry at the beginning of the century, and in the assertion of the superiority of individual genius to the traditional laws of form.

The effect produced by the working of the democratic spirit within the aristocratic constitution of society and taste may without exaggeration be described as prodigious.  At first sight, indeed, there seems to be a certain abruptness in the transition from the highly organized society represented in Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,” to the philosophical retirement of Wordsworth and Coleridge.  It is only when we look beneath the surface that we see the old traditions still upheld by a small class of Conservative writers, including Campbell, Rogers, and Crabbe, and, as far as style is concerned, by some of the romantic innovators, Byron, Scott, and Moore.  But, generally speaking, the age succeeding the first French Revolution exhibits the triumph of individualism.  Society itself is penetrated by new ideas; literature becomes fashionable; men of position are no longer ashamed to be known as authors, nor women of distinction afraid to welcome men of letters in their drawing-rooms.  On all sides the excitement and curiosity of the times is reflected in the demand for poems, novels, essays, travels, and every kind of imaginative production, under the name of belles lettres.