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 presented the remarkable spectacle of a single publisher acting as the centre of attraction to a host of distinguished writers.

In Murray the spirit of the eighteenth century seemed to meet and harmonize with the spirit of the nineteenth.  Enthusiasm, daring, originality, and freedom from conventionality made him eminently a man of his time, and, in a certain sense, he did as much as any of his contemporaries to swell that movement in his profession towards complete individual liberty which had been growing almost from the foundation of the Stationers’ Company.  On the other hand, in his temper, taste, and general principles, he reflected the best and most ancient traditions of his craft.  Had his life been prolonged, he would have witnessed the disappearance in the trade of many institutions which he reverenced and always sought to develop.  Some of them, indeed, vanished in his own life-time.  The old association