a lowness of spirits which I did not get the better of until this morning, when the most enchanting scenery I have ever beheld has at length restored me.  I am far more surprised that Lord Byron should ever have lived at Newstead, than that he should be inclined to part with it; for, as there is no possibility of his being able, by any reasonable amount of expense, to reinstate it, the place can present nothing but a perpetual memorial of the wickedness of his ancestors.  There are three, or at most four, domestics at board wages.  All that I was asked to taste was a piece of bread-and-butter.  As my foot was on the step of the chaise, when about to enter it, I was informed that his lordship had ordered that I should take as much game as I liked.  What makes the steward, Joe Murray, an interesting object to me, is that the old man has seen the abbey in all its vicissitudes of greatness and degradation.  Once it was full of unbounded hospitality and splendour, and now it is simply miserable.  If this man has feelings—­of which, by the way, he betrays no symptom—­he would possibly be miserable himself.  He has seen three hundred of the first people in the county filling the gallery, and seen five hundred deer disporting themselves in the beautiful park, now covered with stunted offshoots of felled trees.  Again I say it gave me the heartache to witness all this ruin, and I regret that my romantic picture has been destroyed by the reality.”

Among the friends that welcomed Mr. Murray to Edinburgh was Mr. William Blackwood, who then, and for a long time after, was closely connected with him in his business transactions.  Blackwood was a native of Edinburgh; having served his apprenticeship with Messrs. Bell & Bradfute, booksellers, he was selected by Mundell & Company to take charge of a branch of their extensive publishing business in Glasgow.  He returned to Edinburgh, and again entered the service of Bell et Bradfute; but after a time went to London to master the secrets of the old book trade under the well-known Mr. Cuthill.  Returning to Edinburgh, he set up for himself in 1804, at the age of twenty-eight, at a shop in South Bridge Street—­confining himself, for the most part, to old books.  He was a man of great energy and decision of character, and his early education enabled him to conduct his correspondence with a remarkable degree of precision and accuracy.  Mr. Murray seems to have done business with him as far back as June 1807, and was in the habit of calling upon Blackwood, who was about his own age, whenever he visited Edinburgh.  The two became intimate, and corresponded frequently; and at last, when Murray withdrew from the Ballantynes, in August 1810 he transferred the whole of his Scottish agency to the house of William Blackwood.  In return for the publishing business sent to him from London, Blackwood made Murray his agent for any new works published by him in Edinburgh.  In this way Murray became the London publisher for Hogg’s new poems, and “The Queen’s Wake,” which had reached its fourth edition.