The alliance that Murray had formed with the Ballantynes was soon dissolved, for Murray, though venturous enough, was a man of business, and their loose, slip-shod way of general dealings, did not at all satisfy his requirements. William Blackwood, then a dealer in antiquarian books, was chosen instead as Edinburgh agent, and, in conjunction with him, Murray purchased the first series of the “Tales of My Landlord.” This was in 1816, and some payments for _Quarterly Review_ articles was well-nigh the last business communication between Scott and Murray. Now that Murray had so completely rivalled Constable in one line--that of the _Review_--he wished to rival him in another. Constable had made an apparent fortune out of Scott’s poetry, in which Murray had in one case, to the extent of one quarter, participated. Scott had, it is true, left Constable, but was for the present unalienable from the Ballantynes, who at this moment enjoyed the dubious services of a London branch. 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 publisher 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 successful 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 for love and fame; he had lately attacked Scott in a directly personal manner, as “Apollo’s venal son:”-- “Though Murray with his Miller may combine To yield thy Muse just half-a-crown per line!”