Page:Essays in miniature.djvu/32



N reading the recently published Memoirs and Correspondence of John Murray, a very interesting and valuable piece of biography—albeit somewhat lengthy for these hurried days—we are forcibly impressed with one surprising truth which we were far from suspecting in our ignorance—namely that the publisher's life, like the policeman's, is not a happy one, but filled to the brim with vexations peculiarly his own. It was as much the fashion in Murray's time as it is in ours to bewail the hard fate of down-trodden authors, and to hint that he who prints the book absorbs the praise and profit which belong in justice to him who writes it. In fact, that trenchant and time-honored jest, "Now Barabbas was a publisher," dates from this halcyon period when Marmion was sold for a thousand guineas, and the third canto of Childe Harold 28