"I got to Newstead about 11 o'clock yesterday and found the steward, my namesake, and the butler waiting for me. The first, who is good-looking and a respectable old man of about sixty-five years, showed me over the house and grounds, which occupied two hours, for I was anxious to examine everything. But never was I more disappointed, for my notions, I suppose, had been raised to the romantic. I had surmised the possibly easy restoration of this once famous abbey, the mere skeleton of which is now fast crumbling to ruin. Lord Byron's immediate predecessor stripped the whole place of all that was splendid and interesting; and you may judge of what he must have done to the mansion when inform you that he converted the ground, which used to be covered with the finest trees, like a forest, into an absolute desert. Not a tree is left standing, and the wood thus shamefully cut down was sold in one day for £60,000. The hall of entrance has about eighteen large niches, which had been filled with statues, and the side walls covered with family portraits and armour. All these have been mercilessly torn down, as well as the magnificent fireplace, and sold. All the beautiful paintings which filled the galleries—valued at that day at £80,000—have disappeared, and the whole place is crumbling into dust. No sum short of £100,000 would make the place habitable. Lord Byron's few apartments contain some modern upholstery, but serve only to show what ought to have been there. They are now digging round the cloisters for a traditionary cannon, and in their progress, about five days ago, they discovered a corpse in too decayed a state to admit of removal. I saw the drinking-skull [Footnote: When the father of the present Mr. Murray was a student in Edinburgh, he wrote to his father (April 10,1827): "I saw yesterday at a jeweller's shop in Edinburgh a great curiosity, no less than Lord Byron's skull cup, upon which he wrote the poem. It is for sale; the owner, whose name I could not learn (it appears he does not wish it known), wants £200 for it.">[ and the marble mausoleum erected over Lord Byron's dog. I came away with my heart aching and full of melancholy reflections—producing a lowness of spirits which I did not get the better of until this morning, when the most enchanting scenery I have ever beheld has at length restored me. I am far more surprised that Lord Byron should ever have lived at Newstead, than that he should be inclined to part with it; for, as there is no possibility of his being able, by any reasonable amount of expense, to reinstate it, the place can present nothing but a perpetual memorial of the wickedness of his ancestors. There are three, or at most four, domestics at board wages. All that I was asked to taste was a piece of bread-and-butter. As my foot was on the step of the chaise, when about to enter it, I was informed that his lordship had ordered that I should take as much game as I liked. What makes the steward, Joe Murray, an interesting object to me, is that the old man has seen the abbey in all its vicissitudes of greatness and degradation. Once it was full of unbounded hospitality and splendour, and now it is simply miserable. If this man has feelings—of which, by the way, he betrays no symptom—he would possibly be miserable himself. He has seen three hundred of the first people in the county filling the gallery, and seen five hundred deer disporting themselves in the beautiful park, now covered with stunted offshoots of felled trees. Again I say it gave me the heartache to witness all this ruin, and I regret that my romantic picture has been destroyed by the reality."
Among the friends that welcomed Mr. Murray to Edinburgh was Mr. William Blackwood, who then, and for a long time after, was closely connected with him in his business transactions. Blackwood was a native of Edinburgh; having served his apprenticeship with Messrs. Bell & Bradfute, booksellers, he was selected by Mundell & Company to take charge of a branch of their extensive publishing business in Glasgow. He returned to Edinburgh, and again entered the service of Bell et Bradfute; but after a time went to London to master the secrets of the old book trade under the well-known Mr. Cuthill. Returning to Edinburgh, he set up for himself in 1804, at the age of twenty-eight, at a shop in South Bridge Street—confining himself, for the most part, to old books. He was a man of great energy and decision of character, and his early education enabled him to conduct his correspondence with a remarkable degree of precision and accuracy. Mr. Murray seems to have done business with him as far back as June 1807, and was in the habit of calling upon Blackwood, who was about his own age, whenever he visited Edinburgh. The two became intimate, and corresponded frequently; and at last, when Murray withdrew from the Ballantynes, in August 1810 he transferred the whole of his Scottish agency to the house of William Blackwood. In return for the publishing business sent to him from London, Blackwood made Murray his agent for any new works published by him in Edinburgh. In this way Murray became the London publisher for Hogg's new poems, and "The Queen's Wake," which had reached its fourth edition.
Mr. Murray paid at this time another visit to Abbotsford. Towards the end of 1814 Scott had surrounded the original farmhouse with a number of buildings—kitchen, laundry, and spare bedrooms—and was able to entertain company. He received Murray with great cordiality, and made many enquiries as to Lord Byron, to whom Murray wrote on his return to London:
John Murray to Lord Byron.
"Walter Scott commissioned me to be the bearer of his warmest greetings to you. His house was full the day I passed with him; and yet, both in corners and at the surrounded table, he talked incessantly of you. Unwilling that I should part without bearing some mark of his love (a poet's love) for you, he gave me a superb Turkish dagger to present to you, as the only remembrance which, at the moment, he could think of to offer you. He was greatly pleased with the engraving of your portrait, which I recollected to carry with me; and during the whole dinner—when all were admiring the taste with which Scott had fitted up a sort of Gothic cottage—he expressed his anxious wishes that you might honour him with a visit, which I ventured to assure him you would feel no less happy than certain in effecting when you should go to Scotland; and I am sure he would hail your lordship as 'a very brother.'"
After all his visits had been paid, and he had made his arrangements with his printers and publishers, Mr. Murray returned to London with his wife and family. Shortly after his arrival he received a letter from Mr. Blackwood.
Mr. Wm. Blackwood to John Murray.
November 8, 1814.
"I was much gratified by your letter informing me of your safe arrival. How much you must be overwhelmed just now, and your mind distracted by so many calls upon your attention at once. I hope that you are now in one of your best frames of mind, by which you are enabled, as you have told me, to go through, with more satisfaction to yourself, ten times the business you can do at other times. While you are so occupied with your great concerns, I feel doubly obliged to you for your remembrance of my small matters."
After referring to his illness, he proceeds: