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 _Wallenstein_, 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 some years he was the chief contributor to Longman’s _Annual Review_ started in 1802, the same year as the _Edinburgh Review_. About this time Longman first went to Scotland, paid a visit to Walter Scott, and purchased the copyright of the _Minstrelsy_ then publishing; and in the following year Rees crossed the borders, and returned with an arrangement to publish the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ on the half-profit system, Constable having, however, a very small share in it. Scott’s moiety of profits was £169 6_s._, and success being then ensured, Longman offered £500 for the copyright, which was at once accepted. They afterwards added £100, “handsomely given to supply the loss of a fine horse which broke down suddenly while the author was riding with one of the worthy publishers” (Owen Rees).