Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/224

188 1 88 JOHN MURRAY. his auspicious reign began to make the Review a quarterly issue of his own miscellaneous works. Strangely enough in the mourning coach that followed GifTord to his grave Murray drove with the man who was destined as an editor to rival the powers of the upbuilder of the Quarterly 's reputation this of course was John Gibson Lockhart, a young Edinburgh advocate, the son-in-law of Scott, and more than that, the author of "Peter's Letters," of "Valerius," of " Reginald Dalton," the translator of " Frederick Schlegel," and the "Ancient Spanish Ballads," and the noted contributor to Blackivood. Moore first heard of the arrangement down at Abbotsford, when Scott, after dinner, hopeful of his daughter's interests, and proud, maybe, of his son-in-law, grew confidential. " Lockhart was about to undertake the Quarterly, has agreed for five years ; salary 1200 a year, and if he writes a certain number of articles it will be 1500 a year." In this year, though the prospects of the Quarterly were ably secured, Murray met with the only really adverse turn of fortune, to which through a long career, and a bold one, he was ever subject. The terrible commercial crisis which had been so long overhanging, burst at last into a deluge of ruin Con- stable's house was swept away, the Ballantynes were for the moment overthrown, and Scott had to give up his lordly estates of Abbotsford, and generously work his life out to redeem a name on which he deemed a commercial slur had been cast. Murray, though he suffered by the panic, as all must suffer in the time of a general epidemic, was not severely hurt. Still, looking back now with the wisdom of wiseacres, who think we could have prophesied easily the actual events that did occur, the time does seem a strange one in