One of those whom Murray wished eagerly to oblige, until he found the task too costly for his purse, was Madame de Staël. For the English and French editions of her work on Germany he paid no less than fifteen hundred pounds, and speedily found himself a loser by the transaction. Gifford, who had scant liking for the celebrated “hurricane in petticoats,” writes to him on the occasion with gentle malice, and a too evident amusement at his discomfiture: “I can venture to assure you that the hope of keeping her from the press is quite vain. The family of Œdipus were not more haunted and goaded by the Furies than the Neckers, father, mother, and daughter, have always been by the demon of publication. Madame de Staël will therefore write and print without intermission.” Not without being well paid, however; for three years later we find the Baron de Staël writing to Murray in his mother’s name, and demanding four thousand pounds for her three-volume work, _Des Causes et des Effets de la Révolution Française_. “My mother _insists_ upon four thousand pounds, besides a credit in books for every new edition,” says this imperative gentleman, somewhat in the manner of a footpad; to whom Murray responds with much tranquillity, thanking him for his “obliging letter,” and intimating that he and Longman together are willing to pay one thousand pounds for the first French and English editions, and three hundred and fifty pounds for the second. Madame de Staël indignantly repudiates this offer, declaring that twenty-five hundred pounds is the least she can think of taking, and that the book will be a bargain at such a price. Murray, who knows something about bargains, and who has been rendered more cautious than usual by his experience with _L’Allemagne_, declines such palpable risks, and excuses himself from further negotiations. _La Révolution Française_ did not appear until after Madame de Staël’s death, when it was published by Messrs. Baldwin and Cradock, and proved a lamentable failure, people having begun by that time to grow a trifle weary of such a thrice-told tale. The most amusing and at the same time most pathetic bit of correspondence in these two big volumes relates to a translation of _Faust_, which Coleridge, so eminently qualified for the task, offers to write for Murray. He unfolds his views in a letter as long as an average essay—or what we call an essay in these degenerate days—evincing on every page a superb contempt for the reading public, which was expected to buy the book, a painful reluctance to “attempt anything of a literary nature with any motive of pecuniary advantage”—which does not prevent him from doing some elaborate bargaining later on—and a tendency to plunge into intellectual abstractions, calculated to chill the heart of the stoutest publisher in Christendom. There is one incomparable paragraph which Coleridge alone could have written, and a portion of which—only a portion—I cannot refrain from quoting: