Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/223

187 JOHN MURRAY. 187 death ; and though Moore, nobly and firmly, refused to receive the money back from Byron's friends, he chose to consider for a time that Murray had wronged him. He took a proposal to Longman of a "Life of Byron," and the matter was partially arranged, when Moore, urged on both by his feelings and his friends, seeing Murray in the street, started after him. " Mr. Murray, some friends of yours and mine seem to think that we should no longer continue on these terms. I therefore proffer you my hand, and most heartily for- give and forget all that has passed." Murray's face brightened into smiles, and on parting he said, " God bless you, sir, God bless you !" Longman agreed, upon this, that Murray was the publisher to whom a life of Byron most properly belonged, and Murray eventually gave ^"4200 for one of the most delightful and entertaining biographies in our literature a com- panion volume, in every way, to Boswell's "Johnson" and Lockhart's " Scott." Murray, in this transaction, seems to have behaved with generous firmness. Now that Byron was dead, the autobiography would cer- tainly have proved the most remunerative of all his works ; and Moore himself, in his Diary, ultimately confessed that "Murray's conduct" had been admirable throughout. In this year, 1824, not only did Murray lose the services and the friendship of his best client, Lord Byron, who died at Missolojighi on the iQth of April, but Gifford, the able editor of the Quarterly, was incapacitated for further work, and resigned his post, Mr. John Coleridge, then a young barrister, succeeded, but though accomplished, clever, and able, he was " scarcely strong enough for the place ;" Southey found out his incapacity for saying " no," and under 122