Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/128

96 o6 THE LONGMAN FAMILY. becoming Byron's publisher, but declined the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers on account of the violent attacks it contained upon his own poets those of the Lake school. With Scott we have seen that he had had dealings, and in these, at all events, Sir Walter's joke, that Longmanwn cst errare, did not hold good. Before the collective edition of 1830, 44,000 copies of the Lay of the Last Minstrel were sold. Though Longman was inclined to believe that Scott was not the author of Waverley, he was equally anxious to secure the publication of some of that extraordinary series of romances ; and at a time when the Ballantynes were in trouble, purchased Guy Mannering by granting bills in advance for 1500, and taking a portion of their stock, to the extent of about 600 more. The Monastery was also published by him in i2O, and he is said, though the authority is more than dubious, to have paid Scott upwards of 20,000 in about fifteen years. What Scott was to Constable, and Byron to Murray, that was Moore to Longman. " Anacreon Moore," as he loved to be called, had gained a naughty reputation from Mr. Thomas Littles Poems, and, in 1811, we find him writing to Longman " I am at last come to a determination to bind myself to your service, if you hold the same favourable disposition towards me as at our last conversation upon business. To-morrow I shall be very glad to be allowed half-an-hour's con- versation with you, and as I dare say I shall be up all night at Carlton House, I do not think I could reach your house before four o'clock. I told you before that I never could work without a retainer. It will not, however, be of that exorbitant nature which your liberality placed at my disposal the first time," Soon