Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/199

JOHN MURRA Y. 165 taker and Gilbert Stuart, who had lately come from Scotland, he started the English Revieiv. A great portion of Murray's retail stock was medi- cal books, and for many years the house had a repu- tation in the medical world. Of the books, however, which he published, those more latterly issued proved by far the most successful, such as Langhorne's "Plutarch's Lives," Mitford's "Greece," and, in 1791, a thin octavo in which the elder Disraeli first gave the public his " Curiosities of Literature" all of them works which have since been annual sources of revenue to the firm. Murray found time, however, amidst all this busi- ness, to indulge his own literary tastes and aspirations, which had at one time been strong. Some of his pamphlets such as the " Letter to Mr. Mason on his Edition of Gray's Poems, and the Practice of Book- sellers " (1777) ; his "Considerations on the Freight and Shipping of the East India Company " (1786), and " An Author's Conduct to the Public, stated in the Behaviour of Dr. William Cullen " (1784) acquired much transient reputation. After a career, as successful we imagine as his wishes could desire, John Murray died on the 6th November, 1793, leaving behind him a widow, two daughters, and an only son, and bequeathing to the latter a business which was destined to carry the name of John Murray wherever the English language was spoken, and wherever English books were read, as the most venturesome and yet the most successful publisher who has ever, in London at all events, encouraged the struggles of authorship and gratified the tastes of half a world of readers. John Murray, the son, the more immediate object