“You offer 1500 guineas for the new canto of (”Don Juan“). I won’t take it. I ask 2500 guineas for it, which you will either give or not, as you think proper. If Mr. Moore is to have 3000 for “Lalla,” &c., if Mr. Crabbe is to have 3000 for his prose or poetry, I ask the aforesaid price for mine.” (“Beppo” was eventually thrown into the bargain.) “You are an excellent fellow, mio caro Murray, but there is still a little leaven of Fleet Street about you now and then—a crumb of the old loaf.... I have a great respect for your good and gentlemanly qualities, and return your friendship towards me; and although I think you are a little spoiled by ‘villanous company,’ with persons of honour about town, authors, and fashionables, together with your ‘I am just going to call at Carlton House, are you walking that way?’—I say, notwithstanding ‘pictures, taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses,’ you deserve the esteem of those whose esteem is worth having.”
Now, like a spoiled child, Byron wishes back all his copyrights, and intends to suppress all that he has ever written, and Murray has to chide him and coax him, with much disinterestedness, urging him to labour steadily for a few years upon some work worthy of his talents, and fit to be a true monument of his fame.
Some of Byron’s letters are in an earnest, many in a playful, mood, most in prose, but sometimes the poet breaks into a charming doggerel of delicious “chaff.” Here is one specimen:—
“TO MR. MURRAY.
“Strahan, Tonson, Lintot of the times,
Patron and publisher of rhymes,
For thee the bard of Pindus climbs,
My Murray.
“To thee, with hope and terror dumb,
The unfledged MS. authors come;
Thou printest all—and sellest some—
My Murray.
“Upon thy tables’ baize so green,
The last new Quarterly is seen,—
But where is thy new magazine,
My Murray?
“Along thy sprucest bookshelves shine
The works thou deemest most divine,—
The ‘Art of Cookery,’ and mine,
My Murray.
“Tours, Travels, Essays, too, I wist,
And Sermons to thy mill bring grist;
And then thou hast the ‘Army List,’
My Murray.