It affords me great pleasure to hear of your advancement; and I trust that your health will enable you to enjoy all the success to which your talents entitle you." He was, for the same reason, under the necessity of declining to publish several new works offered to him, especially those dealing with medical and poetical subjects.
Mr.Archibald Constable of Edinburgh, and Messrs.

Bell & Bradfute, Mr.
Murray's agents in Edinburgh, were also communicated with as to the settlement of their accounts with Murray & Highley.

"I expected," he said, "to have been able to pay my respects to you both this summer [1803], but my _military duties_, and the serious aspect of the times, oblige me to remain at home." It was the time of a patriotic volunteer movement, and Mr.Murray was enrolled as an ensign in the 3rd Regiment of Royal London Volunteers.
It cannot now be ascertained what was the origin of the acquaintance between the D'Israeli and Murray families, but it was of old standing.
The first John Murray published the first volumes of Isaac D'Israeli's "Curiosities of Literature" (1791), and though no correspondence between them has been preserved, we find frequent mention of the founder of the house in Isaac D'Israeli's letters to John Murray the Second.

His experiences are held up for his son's guidance, as for example, when Isaac, urging the young publisher to support some petition to the East India Company, writes, "It was a ground your father trod, and I suppose that connection cannot do you any harm"; or again, when dissuading him from undertaking some work submitted to him, "You can mention to Mr.
Harley the fate of Professor Musaeus' 'Popular Tales,' which never sold, and how much your father was disappointed." On another occasion we find D'Israeli, in 1809, inviting his publisher to pay a visit to a yet older generation, "to my father, who will be very glad to see you at Margate." Besides the "Curiosities of Literature," and "Flim-Flams," the last a volume not mentioned by Lord Beaconsfield in the "Life" of his father prefixed to the 1865 edition of the "Curiosities of Literature," Mr.
D'Israeli published through Murray, in 1803, a small volume of "Narrative Poems" in 4to.

They consisted of "An Ode to his Favourite Critic"; "The Carder and the Currier, a Story of Amorous Florence"; "Cominge, a Story of La Trappe"; and "A Tale addressed to a Sybarite." The verses in these poems run smoothly, but they contain no wit, no poetry, nor even any story.