Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/213

JOHN MURRAY. 177 Looking round among the young and rising writers of the day, for one who was likely to enhance the fame and increase the wealth of his house, Murray mentally selected Lord Byron, then known, not only as the noble poetaster of the "Hours of Idleness," but as the bitterest satirist who had dipped pen in gall since Pope had lashed the hack-writers of his time in the " Dunciad." Murray made no secret of his wish to secure Byron as a client, and the rumour of this desire reached the ears of Mr. Dallas, the novelist, who happened at that very moment to be seeking a pub- lisher for a new poem in two cantos, by his distant cousin and dear college chum, Lord Byron. Byron had just arrived from the East, bringing with him a satire, entitled " Hints from Horace," of which he was not a little hopeful, and also, as he casually mentions, a "new attempt in the Spenserian stanza." Dallas read the " new attempt," and, enthralled by its beauty, forthwith undertook securing its publication. But, even in those days of venturous publishers and suc- cessful poems, the matter looked easier than it proved. Longman declined to publish a poem by a writer who had so recently lashed his own favourite authors. Miller, of Abermarle Street, a notable man in his day, and generous withal (had he not given the widow of the late Charles James Fox 1500 for her defunct husband's historical fragments, and did he not eagerly snatch at one-fourth share of " Marmion ?") would have none of it, his noble patron, Lord Elgin, being abused in the very first canto. Dallas then appears to have heard a rumour of Murray's willingness ; the manuscript was taken to him, and 600 was offered, there and then, for the copyright. Byron was at that time unwilling to receive money for work done solely