Longman left his business to his eldest son, and to his second son, George, he bequeathed a handsome fortune, which enabled him to become a very extensive paper manufacturer at Maidstone, in Kent, and for some years he represented that borough in Parliament. As a further honour, he was drawn for Sheriff of London, but did not serve the office. Edward Longman, the third son, was drowned at an early age in a voyage to India, whither he was proceeding to a naval station in the East India Company’s service. At the time of Thomas Norton Longman’s accession to the chiefdom of the Paternoster Row firm, the literary world was undergoing a seething revolution. Genius was again let loose upon the earth to charm all men by her beauty, and to scare them for a while by her utter contempt for precedent. The torpor in which England had been wrapped during the whole of the foregone Hanoverian dynasty was changing into an eager feeling of unrest, and, later on, to a burning desire to do something, no matter what, and to do it thoroughly in one’s own best manner, and at one’s own truest promptings. No man saw the coming change more clearly than Longman; and anxious to profit by the first-fruits of the future, yet careful not to cast away in his hurry that ponderous ballast of dictionary and compilation, he soon gathered all the young writers of the day within the precincts of his publishing fold. Down at Bristol, the ancestral town of both Longman and Rees, Joseph Cottle had been doing honest service--without, we fear, much profit--in issuing the earliest works of young men who were to take the highest rank among their fellows. Cottle had published Southey’s _Joan of Arc_ in 1796, and in 1798 had issued the _Lyrical Ballads_, the joint composition of Coleridge and Wordsworth. When, in 1800, Longman purchased the entire copyrights of the Bristol firm, at a fair and individual valuation, the _Lyrical Ballads_ were set down in the bill at exactly nothing, and Cottle obtained leave to present the copyright to the authors. In connection with Cottle and Longman, we must here mention a story that does infinite credit to both. At the very close of the eighteenth century, Southey and Cottle in conjunction prepared an edition of Chatterton’s works, to be published by subscription for the benefit of his sister, whose sight was now beginning to fail her. Hitherto, though much money had been made from the works of the “boy poet,” they had been printed only for the emolument of speculators. The edition unfortunately proved a failure, but Longman and Rees entered into a friendly arrangement with Southey, and he was able to report in 1804 that Mrs. Newton lived to receive £184 15_s._ from the profits, when, as she expressed it, she would otherwise have wanted bread. Ultimately, Mary Ann Newton, the poet’s niece, received about £600, the fruits of the generous exertion of a brother poet, and of the good feeling of a kind-hearted publisher.