Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/127

95 THE LONGMAN FAMILY. 95 of the Lyrical Ballads published in 1805 we find the significant epigraph, Quamnihil ad genium, Papinique tuum. In 1807, he published two new volumes, in which appeared many of his choicest pieces, and among them his first sonnets. Jeffrey, however? maintained that they were miserably inferior, and his article put an absolute stop to the sale. Wordsworth had, perhaps deprived himself of all right to complain, for his harshest reviewer did him far more justice than he was wont to deal out to his greatest contemporaries. In 1 8 14, we find Longman announcing, "Just published, the Excursion, being a portion of the Recluse, by William Wordsworth, in 4to., price 2 2s. f boards." Jeffrey used the famous expression " This will never do ;" and Hogg wrote to Southey that Jeffrey had crushed the poem. " What !" retorted Southey, " Jeffrey crush the Excursion ! Tell him he might as easily crush Skiddaw !" Wordsworth, who had in- variably a high value of his "own works, even of his weakest ones, writes also, " I am delighted to learn that the Edinburgh Aristarch has declared against the Excursion, as he will have the mortification of seeing a book enjoy a high reputation to which he has not contributed." For a while, however, Jeffrey's curse was potent, and it took six years to exhaust an edition of only 500 copies. We need scarcely follow Words- worth's various publications' (do their dates not lie on every table of every drawing-room in the land ?), but the whole returns from his literary labours up to 1819 had not amounted to 140; and even in 1829 he remarks that he had worked hard through a long life for less pecuniary emolument than a public per- former earns for two or three songs. Longman had at one time an opportunity of