Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/214

178 178 JOffN MURRAY. for love and fame ; he had lately attacked Scott in a directly personal manner, as " Apollo's venal son :"- " Though Murray with his Miller may combine To yield thy Muse just half-a-crown per line !" and generously made a present of the copyright to Dallas a brother author, less gifted in purse and brain and thus the bargain was concluded. This was the commencement of a friendship between author and publisher which has, perhaps, only one parallel in literary annals that of Scott and Constable. From the letters between Byron and Murray we can discern clearly that the connection, tinged as it was with much generous feeling on both sides, was far from being of a purely commercial nature. " Childe Harold," for this, of course, is the poem referred to, was "put in hand" at once. Quartos were then in vogue for all books likely to attract attention, and Murray insisted that profit as well as portliness was to be found therein. Byron was for octavos and popularity ; but as he said wofully at the end of one of his letters, " one must obey one's bookseller." During the progress of the printing, Byron would lounge into the shop in Fleet Street, fresh from Angelo's and Jackson's. " His great amusement," says Murray, "was in making thrusts with his stick, in fencer's fashion, at the 'spruce books,' as he called them, which I had arranged upon my shelves. He disordered a row for me in a short time, always hitting the volume he had singled out for the exercise of his skill. I was sometimes, as you will guess, glad to get rid of him." As for correction, Byron was willing enough to defer at any time to Murray's advice, upon all questions but politics,