Wordsworth of course continued his connection with the firm, though his profits were absolutely _nil_. Though a poetic philosopher he was not quite proof against the indifference of the public. In the edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ published in 1805 we find the significant epigraph, _Quam nihil 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 1814, we find Longman announcing, “Just published, the _Excursion_, being a portion of the _Recluse_, by William Wordsworth, in 4to., price £2 2_s._, 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 invariably 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 Wordsworth’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 performer earns for two or three songs. Longman had at one time an opportunity of 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 _Longmanum est 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 1820, and he is said, though the authority is more than dubious, to have paid Scott upwards of £20,000 in about fifteen years.