All these annoyances, however, prickly though they appear, are but trifles in comparison with the extraordinary demands made upon Murray as a publisher. Impecunious playwrights, like poor Charles Maturin, pelt him with unsalable dramas and heartrending appeals for help. Impecunious essayists, like Charles Marsh, send papers to the _Quarterly_, and—before they are read—request fifteen pounds, “as money on manuscript deposited.” Impecunious patriots, like Foscolo—that bright particular star of sentimental Liberals—demand loans of a thousand pounds, to be repaid with literary work. Impecunious poets, like James Hogg, borrow fifty pounds with the lofty patronage of sovereigns. It is very amusing to note the tone assumed by the Ettrick Shepherd in his intercourse with a man of Murray’s influence and position. When he is in a good humor, that is, when he has negotiated a successful loan, he writes in this generous fashion: “Though I have heard some bitter things against you, I never met with any man whatever who, on so slight an acquaintance, has behaved to me so much like a gentleman.” Or again, “You may be misled, and you may be mistaken, my dear Murray, but as long as you tell me the simple truth as plainly, you and I will be friends.” If things go haltingly, however, and there is a delay in forwarding cheques, this magnificent condescension sharpens into angry protest. “What the deuce,” he writes vehemently, “have you made of my excellent poem,[1] that you are never publishing it, while I am starving for money, and cannot even afford a Christmas goose to my friends?” When a new edition of _The Queen’s Wake_ was printed in Edinburgh, a very handsome quarto selling for a guinea—which seems a heart-breaking price—Murray with his usual generosity subscribed for twenty-five copies; whereupon we find Hogg promptly acknowledging this munificence by begging him to persuade others to do likewise. “You must make a long pull and a strong pull in London for subscriptions,” he writes, with enviable composure, “as you and Mr. Rogers are the principal men I have to rely on.” There is something very tranquillizing in the gentle art of shifting one’s burdens to other shoulders. Genius flourishes like the mountain oak when it can strike root in the money-boxes of less gifted friends. If tact and patience were both required in soothing Hogg’s petulant vanity and in providing for his extravagant habits, the task became harder and more thankless when Leigh Hunt presented himself in the field. I can imagine few things more delightful than to have had money transactions with a person of Leigh Hunt’s peculiar and highly original methods. He was a kind of literary Oliver, crying perpetually for more. When the _Story of Rimini_ was still uncompleted, it was offered by the poet to Murray with this diverting assurance: