Memoir of John Murray
Walter Scott to John Murray, 3 December 1810
Edinburgh, Dec. 3rd, 1810.
My dear Sir,
I have received your packet with Cromek’s additional sweepings. In his Nithesdale, &c., Sketches he has, I
think, had the assistance of a Mr. Mounsey
Cunningham who used to correspond with Mr. Constable’s ‘Scottish Magazine’ under the
signature J. M. C. I wish you would learn how this stands, for he is a man of
some genius, and I would like to treat him civilly, whereas
Cromek is a perfect brain-sucker, living upon the
labours of others. I have just got ‘Kehama,’ and I hope to have it ready for
the Review,
so I wish you would keep a corner. I shall be puzzled to do justice to the
Review in noticing its
great blemishes, and to the author in pointing out its numerous brilliancies,
but I must do the best I can. I had Weber’s Romances in hand, but I have laid them aside for
this more pressing and more interesting matter.
I beg you will keep my remittances till the end of the year,
and shall write so to Mr. Gifford. It is
sometimes convenient to have credit for a few guineas in London. Believe me
that as I have not had any cause whatever, so I have not had the least
intention to slacken our correspondence, but the dulness of the literary world,
at least in those articles of lighter calibre in which I deal, gave me but
little to say.
I remain, dear Sir,
Yours very truly,
Archibald Constable (1774-1827)
Edinburgh bookseller who published the
Edinburgh Review and works
of Sir Walter Scott; he went bankrupt in 1826.
Robert Hartley Cromek (1770-1812)
Scottish engraver who published Blake's etchings to Robert Blair's
The
Grave and the
Reliques of Robert Burns (1808) and
Select Scottish Songs (1810).
Thomas Mounsey Cunningham (1776-1834)
Scottish poet, the elder brother of the poet Allan Cunningham; he emigrated to London
where he was employed as an engineer.
William Gifford (1756-1826)
Poet, scholar, and editor who began as a shoemaker's apprentice; after Oxford he
published
The Baviad (1794),
The Maeviad
(1795), and
The Satires of Juvenal translated (1802) before becoming
the founding editor of the
Quarterly Review (1809-24).
Henry William Weber (1783-1818)
The son of a Moravian father and English mother, he published an edition of the works of
John Ford and Beaumont and Fletcher; after working as an editorial assistant to Walter
Scott he spent his latter years in a lunatic asylum.
The Quarterly Review. (1809-1967). Published by John Murray, the
Quarterly was instigated by Walter
Scott as a Tory rival to the
Edinburgh Review. It was edited by
William Gifford to 1824, and by John Gibson Lockhart from 1826 to 1853.
The Scots Magazine. 65 vols (1739-1803). Continued as
The Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany
(1804-17) and
The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany
(1817-26).
