The multiplication of
reviews, magazines, manuals, and abstracts has impaired the love of, and
perhaps the capacity for, study, research, and scholarship on which the
general quality of literature must depend. Books, and even knowledge,
like other commodities, may, in proportion to the ease with which they
are obtained, lose at once both their external value and their intrinsic
merit.
Murray's professional success is sufficient evidence of the extent of
his intellectual powers. The foregoing Memoir has confined itself almost
exclusively to an account of his life as a publisher, and it has been
left to the reader's imagination to divine from a few glimpses how much
of this success was due to force of character and a rare combination of
personal qualities. A few concluding words on this point may not be
inappropriate.
Quick-tempered and impulsive, he was at the same time warm-hearted and
generous to a fault, while a genuine sense of humour, which constantly
shows itself in his letters, saved him many a time from those troubles
into which the hasty often fall. "I wish," wrote George Borrow, within a
short time of the publisher's death, "that all the world were as gay as
he.
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