and generously made a present of the copyright to Dallas--a brother author, less gifted in purse and brain--and thus the bargain was concluded. This was the commencement of a friendship between author and publisher which has, perhaps, only one parallel in literary annals--that of Scott and Constable. From the letters between Byron and Murray we can discern clearly that the connection, tinged as it was with much generous feeling on both sides, was far from being of a purely commercial nature. “Childe Harold,” for this, of course, is the poem referred to, was “put in hand” at once. Quartos were then in vogue for all books likely to attract attention, and Murray insisted that profit as well as portliness was to be found therein. Byron was for octavos and popularity; but as he said wofully at the end of one of his letters, “one must obey one’s bookseller.” During the progress of the printing, Byron would lounge into the shop in Fleet Street, fresh from Angelo’s and Jackson’s. “His great amusement,” says Murray, “was in making thrusts with his stick, in fencer’s fashion, at the ‘sprucebooks,’ as he called them, which I had arranged upon my shelves. He disordered a row for me in a short time, always hitting the volume he had singled out for the exercise of his skill. I was sometimes, as you will guess, glad to get rid of him.” As for correction, Byron was willing enough to defer at any time to Murray’s advice, upon all questions but politics, though only to a limited extent: “If you don’t like it, say so, and I’ll alter it, but _don’t_ suggest anything instead.” In one letter we find a strange absence of a young writer’s anxiety anent the importance of typography. “The printer may place the notes in his _own way_, or in any _way_, so that they are out of my way.” In another: “_You have looked at it?_ to much purpose, to allow so stupid a blunder to stand; it is not ‘courage,’ but ‘carnage,’ and if you don’t want to see me cut my own throat see it altered!” Again, but later, “If every syllable were a rattlesnake, or every letter a pestilence, they should not be expunged.” “I do believe the Devil never created or perverted such a fiend as the fool of a printer.” “For God’s sake,” he writes in another place, “instruct Mr. Murray not to allow his shopman to call the work ‘Child of Harrow’s Pilgrimage!!!’ as he has done to some of my astonished friends, who wrote to inquire after my sanity on the occasion, as well they might!” To John Murray we imagine Lord Byron must have appeared as much of a contradiction as he did to the world outside.