The Murray
correspondence contains many characteristic letters from this jovial and
impecunious Irishman. He is generally supposed to have been the
prototype of Thackeray's Captain Shandon.--T.M.] had been engaged--the
Morgan O'Doherty of _Blackwood's Magazine_--wit, scholar, and Bohemian.
He was sent to Paris, where he evidently enjoyed himself; but the
results, as regarded the _Representative_, were by no means
satisfactory. He was better at borrowing money than at writing articles.
Mr. S.C. Hall, one of the parliamentary reporters of the paper, says,
in his "Retrospect of a Long Life," that:
"The day preceding the issue of the first number, Mr. Murray might have
obtained a very large sum for a shore of the copyright, of which he was
the sole proprietor; the day after that issue, the copyright was worth
comparatively nothing.... Editor there was literally none, from the
beginning to the end. The first number supplied conclusive evidence of
the utter ignorance of editorial tact on the part of the person
entrusted with the duty.... In short, the work was badly done; if not a
snare, it was a delusion; and the reputation of the new journal fell
below zero in twenty-four hours.
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