Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/216

180 i8o JOHN MURRAY, was written to before by author :" " It is bad enough to be a scribbler, without having recourse to such shifts to escape from or deprecate censure. It is anticipating, begging, kneeling, adulating the devil ! the devil ! the devil ! and all without my wish, and contrary to my desire." In the early spring of 1812, " Childe Harold " was ready, and three days before its appearance, Byron made his maiden speech in the House of Lords ; a speech which was received with attention and hailed with applause, from those whose applause was in itself fame. It is needless here to recapitulate the success of " Childe Harold," how, on the day after publication, Lord Byron awoke, and, as he himself phrased it, found himself famous. The publication of " Childe Harold," was not the only important event of this year, 1812, to the subject of our memoir. In this same year,, Murray purchased the stock-in-trade of worthy Mr. Miller, of 50, Albe- marle Street, and migrated thither, leaving the old shop, east of Temple Bar, to be re-occupied by-and- by (in 1832) by the Highley family. Here it was, at Albemarle Street, that Murray at- tained the highest pinnacle of fame on which ever publisher stood. His drawing-room, at four o'clock, became the favourite resort of all the talent in litera- ture and in art that London then possessed, and there were giants in those days. There it was his " custom of an afternoon," to gather together such men as Byron, Scott, Moore, Campbell, Southey, Gifford, Hallam, Lockhart, Washington Irving, and Mrs. Somerville ; and, more than this, he invited such artists as Laurence, Wilkie, Phillips, Newton, and Pickersgill to meet them and to paint them, that they might hang for