Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/232

196 10 JOHN MURRAY. Lettres." Among the most valuable and successful of these were the expeditions of Mungo Park, Belzoni, Parry, Franklin, Denham, and Clapperton. Murray had just launched his " Classical Hand- books," under the editorship of his son had just made, in trade parlance, " another great hit " in Lady Sale's " Journal in Afghanistan " when an attack of general debility and exhaustion compelled him to leave business and success alone and for ever. He rallied so often that no serious results were anticipated by his family or physician ; but after a very short ill- ness he died suddenly on the 2/th June, 1843, in the fifty-sixth year of his age, leaving three daughters and one only son. To his widow, in a will dated only seven days before his death, he bequeathed the whole of his estate. A gentleman by manners and education ; generous and open-handed, not for purposes of display, often not from mere trade motives, but from a true desire to return to genius and industry something of what he derived from them ; an excellent man of business, with more powers of work than most men, under- standing better than any how to measure the calibre of an author's genius, and to gauge the duration of his popularity ; skilful in timing a publication, so as to ensure a favourable reception, and yet honestly abhor- ring any recourse to the low art of puffing such was John Murray as a publisher ; the best representative of an honourable calling, and one who by his own influence tended not a little to make the years of his own working life the best representative period of English literature. Mr. John Murray, who succeeded at once to his father's business, was born in the year 1808, and was