and that no man was under any obligation to read what another man wrote. This is an old-fashioned point of view, which has lost favor of late years, but which is not without compensations of its own. If the office of literature be to make glad our lives, how shall we seek the joy in store for us save by following Hazlitt’s simple suggestion, and reading “with all the satisfaction in our power”? And how shall we insure this satisfaction, save by ignoring the restrictions imposed upon us, and cultivating, as far as we can, a sincere and pleasurable intercourse with our friends, the books? TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER In reading the recently published _Memoirs and Correspondence of John Murray_, a very interesting and valuable piece of biography—albeit somewhat lengthy for these hurried days—we are forcibly impressed with one surprising truth which we were far from suspecting in our ignorance—namely, that the publisher’s life, like the policeman’s, is not a happy one, but filled to the brim with vexations peculiarly his own. It was as much the fashion in Murray’s time as it is in ours to bewail the hard fate of down-trodden authors, and to hint that he who prints the book absorbs the praise and profit which belong in justice to him who writes it. In fact, that trenchant and time-honored jest, “Now Barabbas was a publisher,” dates from this halcyon period when _Marmion_ was sold for a thousand guineas, and the third canto of _Childe Harold_ for nearly twice that sum. Murray himself possessed such influence in the literary world that the battle with the public was thought to be half won when a book appeared armed with the sanction of his name. He was a man of wealth, too, of social standing, of severe and fastidious tastes; exactly fitted by circumstances, if not by nature, to play the autocratic _rôle_ popularly assigned to all his craft, to crush the aspiring poet in the dust, to freeze the budding genius who sought assistance at his hands, to override with haughty arrogance the wan and needy scholar who waited at his door. Instead of this, we see him enduring with lamblike gentleness an amount of provocation which would have hallowed a mediæval saint, and which seems to our undisciplined spirits as wantonly exasperating and malign.