The success of _Marmion_ as a publication was as remarkable as that of the _Lay_. The first edition, as usual a splendid quarto, of two thousand copies was sold out in less than a month. More than thirty thousand copies had been sold before the collected edition of the poems appeared in 1830.
John Murray--Share in _Marmion_--Reverence for Scott--_The Quarterly Review_--The 'Cevallos' Article--Jeffrey's Pessimism--Contemplated Flight to America--Anecdotes of Earl of Buchan.
When Constable had concluded his arrangement with Scott, he followed a usual and prudent practice in offering fourth shares of the adventure to two other booksellers. They agreed, and their reply added, 'We both view it as honourable, profitable, and glorious to be concerned in the publication of a new poem by Walter Scott.' The writer of these words was John Murray, of Fleet Street, a young bookseller already of some note. Murray, as a keen business man, had evidently an eye to see and a mind that could grasp the future. He was aware that the _Edinburgh Review_ was the great source and support of Constable's fortunes. Knowing also that Scott, though a Tory, was an important contributor to the _Review_, ne seems to have been on the watch for the time when, as he acutely anticipated, some occasion of rupture would emerge. He told Lockhart long after that when he read the review of _Marmion_ and the political article in the same number, he said to himself--'Walter Scott has feelings both as a gentleman and a Tory, which these people must now have wounded; the alliance between him and the whole clique of the _Review_, its proprietor included, is now shaken.' With the same sagacity, he pushed his advances towards Scott by the medium of James Ballantyne. Murray came north in person, visited Scott at Ashestiel, and learned that, as he had expected, the disruption had begun. Scott had, in fact, been so disgusted with an article in the twenty-sixth number entitled 'Don Cevallos on the Usurpation of Spain,' that he had written to Constable withdrawing his subscription and saying, 'The _Edinburgh Review_ had become such as to render it impossible for me to continue a contributor to it.--_Now_, it is such as I can no longer continue to receive or read it.' Mr. Cadell, one of Constable's partners, mentions that the list of the then subscribers exhibits, in an indignant dash of Constable's pen opposite Scott's name, the word 'STOPT!!!' The opportunity was a good one for advancing Murray's views. Before the end of the year some unguarded words of Mr. Hunter, Constable's junior partner, made the breach complete. We find Scott writing about 'folks who learn to undervalue the means by which they have risen,' and Constable stamping his foot and saying, 'Ay, there is such a thing as rearing the oak until it can support itself.' The result of all this, as concerns Scott, was that he eagerly entered into Murray's plans for establishing a rival _Review_, and that he carried out a scheme, 'begun' (Lockhart admits) 'in the short-sighted heat of pique,' of starting a new bookselling house in Edinburgh, another rival to Constable.