Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/123

91 THE LONGMAN FAMILY. 91 generous exertion of a brother poet, and of the good feeling of a kind-hearted publisher. The first edition of the Lyrical Ballads did eventually sell out, and then Wordsworth, detaching his own poems from the others, and adding several new ones thereto, obtained .100 from Longman for the use of two editions, but the sale was so very slow that the bargain was probably unprofitable. In this same year 1800 the house of Longman also published Coleridge's translation of Schiller's Wai- lenstein, written in the short space of six weeks. Very few copies were sold, but after remaining on hand for sixteen years, the remainder was sold off rapidly at a double price. Southey (a Bristol man himself) met, too, with much kindness from the firm, but after his first poem with but little, as a poet, from the public. We have seen before that "the profits" on Madoc "amounted to exactly three pounds seventeen shillings and a penny." No wonder that he writes to a friend, " Books are now so dear that they are becoming articles of fashionable furniture more than anything else ; they who do buy them do not read, and they who read them do not buy them. I have seen a Wiltshire clothier who gives his bookseller no other instructions than the dimensions of his shelves ; and have just heard of a Liverpool merchant who is fitting up a library, and has told his bibliopole to send him Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, and if any of those fellows should publish anything new to let him have it immediately. If Madoc obtains any celebrity, its size and cost will recommend it to those gentry libros consumere nati, born to buy octavos and help the revenue." Southey's prose, however, proved infinitely more profitable, and for e 2