of booksellers, with its accompaniment of trade-books, dwindled with the growth of the spirit of competition and the greater facility of communication, so that, long before his death, the co-operation between the booksellers of London and Edinburgh was no more than a memory.  Another institution which had his warm support was the Sale dinner, but this too has all but succumbed, of recent years, to the existing tendency for new and more rapid methods of conducting business.  The object of the Sale dinner was to induce the great distributing houses and the retail booksellers to speculate, and buy an increased supply of books on special terms.  Speculation has now almost ceased in consequence of the enormous number of books published, which makes it difficult for a bookseller to keep a large stock of any single work, and renders the life of a new book so precarious that the demand for it may at any moment come to a sudden stop.

The country booksellers—­a class in which Murray was always deeply interested—­are dying out.  Profits on books being cut down to a minimum, these tradesmen find it almost impossible to live by the sale of books alone, and are forced to couple this with some other kind of business.

The apparent risk involved in Murray’s extraordinary spirit of adventure was in reality diminished by the many checks which in his day operated on competition, and by the high prices then paid for ordinary books.  Men were at that time in the habit of forming large private libraries, and furnishing them with the sumptuous 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  Collections of books have been superseded, as a fashion, by collections of pictures, and the circulating library encourages the habit of reading books without buying them.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.