presented the remarkable
spectacle of a single publisher acting as the centre of attraction to a
host of distinguished writers.

In Murray the spirit of the eighteenth century seemed to meet and
harmonize with the spirit of the nineteenth. Enthusiasm, daring,
originality, and freedom from conventionality made him eminently a man
of his time, and, in a certain sense, he did as much as any of his
contemporaries to swell that movement in his profession towards complete
individual liberty which had been growing almost from the foundation of
the Stationers' Company. On the other hand, in his temper, taste, and
general principles, he reflected the best and most ancient traditions of
his craft. Had his life been prolonged, he would have witnessed the
disappearance in the trade of many institutions which he reverenced and
always sought to develop. Some of them, indeed, vanished in his own
life-time. The old association of booksellers, with its accompaniment of
trade-books, dwindled with the growth of the spirit of competition and
the greater facility of communication, so that, long before his death,
the co-operation between the booksellers of London and Edinburgh was no
more than a memory. Another institution which had his warm support was
the Sale dinner, but this too has all but succumbed, of recent years, to
the existing tendency for new and more rapid methods of conducting
business. The object of the Sale dinner was to induce the great
distributing houses and the retail booksellers to speculate, and buy an
increased supply of books on special terms. Speculation has now almost
ceased in consequence of the enormous number of books published, which
makes it difficult for a bookseller to keep a large stock of any single
work, and renders the life of a new book so precarious that the demand
for it may at any moment come to a sudden stop.

The country booksellers--a class in which Murray was always deeply
interested--are dying out. Profits on books being cut down to a minimum,
these tradesmen find it almost impossible to live by the sale of books
alone, and are forced to couple this with some other kind of business.

The apparent risk involved in Murray's extraordinary spirit of adventure
was in reality diminished by the many checks which in his day operated
on competition, and by the high prices then paid for ordinary books. Men
were at that time in the habit of forming large private libraries, and
furnishing them with the sum