Samuel Smiles

“ As for me, nobody has more sincere respect for them in their own different walks of excellence than myself; and if there be one thing that I may promise for myself, it is, that age, experience, and eminence, shall never find fair reason to accuse me of treating them with presumption. I am much more afraid of falling into the opposite error. I have written at some length on these matters to Mr. Croker, Mr. Ellis, and Mr. Rose—and to no one else; nor will I again put pen to paper, unless someone, having a right to put a distinct question to me, does put it.
Mr. Lockhart to John Murray. ”

“ I am therefore fearful to risk my property in an affair so extremely unsuitable.
"You distress me sadly by the announcement of having put the 'Secret Memoirs' to press, and that the paper for it was actually purchased six months ago! How can you, my good sirs, act in this way? How can you imagine that a bookseller can afford to pay eternal advances upon almost every work in which he takes a share with you? And how can you continue to destroy every speculation by entering upon new ones before the previous ones are properly completed?... ”

“ 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. ”

“ My house is excellent; and I transact all the departments of my business in an elegant library, which my drawing-room becomes during the morning; and there I am in the habit of seeing persons of the highest rank in literature and talent, such as Canning, Frere, Mackintosh, Southey, Campbell, Walter Scott, Madame de Staël, Gifford, Croker, Barrow, Lord Byron, and others; thus leading the most delightful life, with means of prosecuting my business with the highest honour and emolument. ”

“ Pause, my dear sirs, whilst to choose be yet in your power; show yourselves superior to common prejudice, and by an immediate exercise of your acknowledged pre-eminence of intellect, suffer arrangements to be made for an accommodation and for a renewal of that connexion which has heretofore been productive of honour and profit. I am sure I have to apologize for having ventured to say so much to men so much my superiors in sense and knowledge of the world and their own interest; but sometimes the meanest bystander may perceive disadvantages in the movements of the most skilful players. ”

“ George Borrow to John Murray, Junior.
LOWESTOFT, December 1, 1842.
MY DEAR SIR, I received your kind letter containing the bills. It was very friendly of you, and I thank you, though, thank God, I have no Christmas bills to settle. Money, however, always acceptable. I dare say I shall be in London with the entrance of the New Year; I shall be most happy to see you, and still more your father, whose jokes do one good. I wish all the world were as gay as he; a gentleman drowned himself last week on my property, I wish he had gone somewhere else. I can't get poor Allan out of my head. ”

“ Sharon Turner to John Murray.
"I cannot endure the idea of an individual being wounded merely because he has written a book. If, as in the case of the authors attacked in the 'Baviad,' the works censured were vitiating our literature—or, as in the case of Moore's Poems, corrupting our morals—if they were denouncing our religious principles, or attacking those political principles on which our Government subsists—let them be criticised without mercy. ”

“ I do not, however, believe but that he will continue to do what he has been used to do for the Review; indeed, unless he makes the newspaper business his excuse, he stands completely pledged to me to adhere to that.
But with reverence be it spoken, even this does not seem to me a matter of very great moment. On the contrary, I believe that his papers in the Review have (with a few exceptions) done the work a great deal more harm than good. I cannot express what I feel; but there was always the bitterness of Gifford without his dignity, and the bigotry of Southey without his bonne-foi. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If Gifford could see me by this fireside, where, like Nicodemus, one candle suffices me in a large room, he would see a man in a coat 'still more threadbare than his own' when he wrote his 'Imitation,' working hard and getting little—a bare maintenance, and hardly that; writing poems and history for posterity with his whole heart and soul; one daily progressive in learning, not so learned as he is poor, not so poor as proud, not so proud as happy. ”

“ 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.
A certain romantic spirit of enterprise shows itself in Murray's character at the very outset of his career. Tied to a partner of a petty and timorous disposition, he seizes an early opportunity to rid himself of the incubus. With youthful ardour he begs of a veteran author to be allowed the privilege of publishing, as his first undertaking, a work which he himself genuinely admired. ”

“ I have resisted, with undeviating firmness, every attempt to encroach upon me, every solicitation of publisher, author, friend, or friend's friend, and turned not a jot aside for power or delight. In consequence of this integrity of purpose, the Review has long possessed a degree of influence, not only in this, but in other countries hitherto unknown; and I have the satisfaction, at this late hour, of seeing it in its most palmy state. No number has sold better than the sixtieth. ”

“ Except the occupation of one or two annoyances, I have done nothing but read, since I got "Lord Byron's Life." I have no pretensions to being a critic, yet I know infinitely well what pleases me. Not to mention the judicious arrangement and happy tact displayed by Mr. Moore, which distinguish the book, I must say a word concerning the style, which is elegant and forcible. I was particularly struck by the observations on Lord Byron's character before his departure to Greece, and on his return. There is strength and richness, as well as sweetness. ”

“ No man without a very high sense of justice and self-respect could have conducted a correspondence on a matter of business in terms of such dignified propriety as Murray employed in addressing Benjamin Disraeli after the collapse of the Representative. It is indeed a proof of power to appreciate character, remarkable in so young a man, that Disraeli should, after all that had passed between them, have approached Murray in his capacity of publisher with complete confidence. ”

“ And I could say something on the other side of the picture, showing that although literature in almost all cases is the worst trade to which a man can possibly betake himself, it is the best and wisest of all pursuits for those whose provision is already made, and of all amusements for those who have leisure to amuse themselves. It has long been my intention to leave behind me my own Memoirs, as a post-obit for my family—a wise intention no doubt, and one which it is not very prudent to procrastinate. ”

“ DEAR MURRAY, I have to thank you for letting me see your two new cantos [the 3rd and 4th] , which I return. What sublimity! what levity! what boldness! what tenderness! what majesty! what trifling! what variety! what tediousness!—for tedious to a strange degree, it must be confessed that whole passages are, particularly the earlier stanzas of the fourth canto. I know no man of such general powers of intellect as Brougham, yet I think him insufferably tedious ”

“ 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. ”

“ Murray had now attained.
"Murray offers me a thousand guineas for my intended poem in blank verse, and begs it may not be a line longer than "Thomson's Seasons"! I rather think the poem will be a post obit, and in that case, twice that sum, at least, may be demanded for it. What his real feelings may be towards me, I cannot tell; but he is a happy fellow, living in the light of his own glory. The Review is the greatest of all works, and it is all his own creation; he prints 10,000, and fifty times ten thousand read its contents, in the East and in the West. Joy be with him and his journal!" ”

“ There are few men of any rank in letters who have not at some time or other been guilty of some abuse of their satirical powers, and very few who have not seen reason to wish that they had restrained their vein of pleasantry. Thinking over Lockhart's offences with my own, and other men's whom either politics or literary controversy has led into such effusions, I cannot help thinking that five years' proscription ought to obtain a full immunity on their account. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You have, my good friend, enough of expense to incur in forwarding this great and dubious undertaking, and God forbid I should add so unreasonable a charge as your liberality points at. I am very frank in money matters, and always take my price when I think I can give money's worth for money, but this is quite extravagant, and you must think no more of it. Should I want money for any purpose I will readily make you my banker and give you value in reviews. John Ballantyne's last remittance continues to go off briskly; the devil's in you in London, you don't know good writing when you get it. ”

“ PREFACE When my Grandfather's Memoirs were published, twenty years ago, they met with a most favourable and gratifying reception at the hands of the public. Interest was aroused by the struggle and success of a man who had few advantages at the outset save his own shrewd sense and generous nature, and who, moreover, was thrown on his own resources to fight the battle of life when he was little more than a child. ”

“ I have lately heard, from good authority, that the annual profit of the Times is £40,000, and that a share in the Courier sold last week (wretchedly conducted, it seems) at the rate of £100,000 for the property.
But this is not all. You know well enough that the business of a publishing bookseller is not in his shop or even his connection, but in his brains; and we can put forward together a series of valuable literary works, and without, observe me, in any of these plans, the slightest risk to Mr. Lockhart. ”

“ Your father's death is a loss which is mourned on this side of the Atlantic. His powerful agency on the patronage of a correct literature, which he was so well qualified to appreciate, has rendered him a benefactor in that realm of intellect which binds men together in all ages, however dissevered by political creed or local prejudice. His urbanity to strangers is treasured with gratitude in many hearts. To me his personal kindness was so great that I deeply regretted not having formed his acquaintance until just on the eve of my leaving London. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is quite useless to write books unless they sell, and the public has of late become so fastidious that it is no easy matter to please it. With respect to the critique in the Times, I fully agree with you that it was harsh and unjust, and the passages selected by no means calculated to afford a fair idea of the contents of the work. A book, however, like "The Bible in Spain" can scarcely be published without exciting considerable hostility, and I have been so long used to receiving hard knocks that they make no impression upon me. After all, the abuse of the Times is better than its silence ”