The book has two title-pages; or, rather, like many of the books of its day, there belong two title-pages to the same edition of it--the custom having been for a second bookseller, who bought what the first bookseller was minded to get rid of, to print his own title-page. This is the course that the thing followed in the matter of _Lyrical Ballads_. The book was printed, as we shall see in detail presently, by Cottle, in Bristol, in the year 1798. Five hundred copies were printed, but they did not sell. ‘As a curious literary fact,’ says Cottle, in his ‘Recollections,’ ‘I might mention that the sale of the First Edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was so slow, and the severity of most of the reviews so great, that its progress to oblivion seemed ordained to be as rapid as it was certain.’ ‘I had given,’ he adds, ‘thirty guineas for the copyright; but the heavy sale induced me to part with the largest proportion of the impression of 500, at a loss, to Mr. Arch, a London bookseller.’ Mr. Arch printed his own title-page. My copy has his title-page, ‘_London, printed for J. & A. Arch, Gracechurch Street_’; and so, I think, had the copy sold at Mr. Dew Smith’s sale, about four years ago. The date, of course, remains the same, 1798, and all else remains the same. The British Museum copy--it was Southey’s copy--has the Bristol title-page, and the Museum may possibly acquire a copy with Mr. Arch’s when opportunity occurs. In the only copy of the First Edition which they have at present, the words are, ‘_Bristol, printed by Biggs and Cottle, for T. N. Longman, Paternoster Row, London_.’ Thus the First Edition of five hundred was divided--say two hundred for Mr. Cottle, say three hundred for Mr. Arch when the Bristolian found the sale was ‘slow’ and ‘heavy.’ Where have they all gone to? It was only eighty-four years ago. But where have all the copies of the big edition of the _Christmas Carol_ gone to? That was hardly forty years ago.