Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/521

479 PROVINCIAL BOOKSELLERS. 479 with Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, and Lamb, when they were still unknown to fame, and with a rare per- ception of genius he was able to assist them materially towards the goal of success. From his interesting " Early Recollections," we gather that one evening Coleridge told him despondently that he had been the round of London booksellers with a volume of poems, and that all but one had refused to even look over the manuscript, and that this one proffered him six guineas for the copyright, which sum, poor as he was, he felt constrained to decline. Cottle at once offered the young author thirty guineas, and actually paid the money before the completion of the volume, which appeared in 1796. To Southey he made the same bid for his first volume, and the offer was eagerly accepted. Cottle at once, however, added, " You have read me some books of your ' Joan of Arc,' which poem I perceive to have great merit. If it meet with your concurrence I will give you fifty guineas for this work, and publish it in quarto, when I will give you in addition fifty copies to dispose of among your friends." Southey corroborates this account, and further says, " It can rarely happen that a young author should meet with a bookseller as inexperienced and as ardent as himself ; and it would be still more extraordinary if such mutual indiscretion did not bring with it cause for regret to both. But this transaction was the com- mencement of an intimacy which has continued with- out the slightest shade of displeasure at any time on either side to the present day." Cottle ordered a new fount of type " for what was intended to be the hand- somest book that Bristol had ever yet sent forth," and owing, perhaps, more to the party feelings of the