Mr. Lockhart to John Murray.
February 25, 1843.
DEAR MURRAY,
I don't know if you have read much of "The Life of Wilkie." All Cunningham's part seems to be wretched, but in the "Italian and Spanish Journals and Letters" Wilkie shines out in a comparatively new character. He is a very eloquent and, I fancy, a deep and instructive critic on painting; at all events, Vol. ii. is full of very high interest…. Is there anywhere a good criticism on the alteration that Wilkie's style exhibited after his Italian and Spanish tours? The general impression always was, and I suppose will always be, that the change was for the worse. But it will be a nice piece of work to account for an unfortunate change being the result of travel and observation, which we now own to have produced such a stock of admirable theoretical disquisition on the principles of the Art. I can see little to admire or like in the man Wilkie. Some good homely Scotch kindness for kith and kin, and for some old friends too perhaps; but generally the character seems not to rise above the dull prudentialities of a decent man in awe of the world and the great, and awfully careful about No. 1. No genuine enjoyment, save in study of Art, and getting money through that study. He is a fellow that you can't suppose ever to have been drunk or in love—too much a Presbyterian Elder for either you or me.
Mr. Murray received a communication (December 16, 1841), from Mr. John Sterling, Carlyle's friend, with whom he had had transactions on his own account. "Not," he said, "respecting his own literary affairs, but those of a friend." The friend was Mr. John Stuart Mill, son of the historian of British India. He had completed his work on Logic, of which Mr. Sterling had the highest opinion. He said it had been the "labour of many years of a singularly subtle, patient, and comprehensive mind. It will be our chief speculative monument of this age." Mr. Mill himself addressed Mr. Murray, first on December 20, 1841, while he was preparing the work for the press, and again in January and February, 1842, when he had forwarded the MS. to the publisher, and requested his decision. We find, however, that Mr. Murray was very ill at the time; that he could not give the necessary attention to the subject; and that the MS. was eventually returned.
When Copyright became the subject of legislation in 1843, Mr. Murray received a letter from Mr. Gladstone.
Mr. Gladstone to John Murray.
WHITEHALL, February 6, 1843.
MY DEAR SIR,
I beg leave to thank you for the information contained in and accompanying your note which reached me on Saturday. The view with which the clauses relating to copyright in the Customs Act were framed was that those interested in the exclusion of pirated works would take care to supply the Board of Customs from time to time with lists of all works under copyright which were at all likely to be reprinted abroad, and that this would render the law upon the whole much more operative and more fair than an enormous catalogue of all the works entitled to the privilege, of which it would be found very difficult for the officers at the ports to manage the use.