Two days later he wrote to Briggs, “I am, you see, as good as my word and better. For, as I was copying the other verses this morning, I thought I might as well throw you in Holmes to boot. Let the new passage begin thus,-- “Here, ‘Forgive me, Apollo,’ I cried, ‘while I pour’ &c., &c. Please make the alteration and put in marks of quotation at the beginning of each new paragraph if I have omitted them. Also in this line if it runs as I think it does, “‘So, compared to you moderns, is old Melesigines,’ insert ‘sounds’ instead of ‘is.’ “I wish you would do up a copy with ‘author’s and so forths,’ _dated New York_, and put it into Ticknor’s first box directed to Dr. O. W. Holmes, Boston, and also one directed to Professor Felton, Cambridge, in Ticknor’s or Nichols’s as it may chance.... “Print the title-page thus:-- “‘Reader, walk up’ etc., as far as ‘ruinous rate’ in large italics in old-fashioned style in an inverted cone [Illustration: \ / \ / \ / A ] down to Fable for Critics in very large caps. Then the rest in small caps properly broken up so as to conceal the fact of the rhyme.[72] You will like the tribute to our Massachusetts. It is clearly the best passage in the poem, and you will see how adroitly it comes back to the _theme_, the general comic and satiric tone, of the rest.” The date on the rhymed title-page was anticipated a little, for the book was advertised for 20 October, and delivered on the 25th. A thousand copies had been printed from type and were quickly disposed of. The little book was then stereotyped and a second edition issued the first of the New Year, with the new preface which is still attached to the poem. In February it had gone to a third edition, but at the end of November, 1849, it had not sold beyond three thousand copies, though a fourth edition was then talked of. It is to be feared that Mr. Briggs’s golden eggs were addled.