Some persons may be predisposed to misconstrue the motive for giving publicity to the following letter, but others, it is hoped, will admit that the sole object has been, not to draw the reader's attention to the writer, but to confer _credit on Southey_. Many are the individuals who would have assisted, to a greater extent than myself, two young men of decided genius, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, who required, at the commencement of their literary career, encouragement, and a little assistance. Few however, would have exhibited the magnanimity which Southey displayed, in seasons of improved circumstances, by referring to slender acts of kindness, long past, and scarcely remembered but by himself. Few are the men, who, after having surmounted their difficulties by honourable exertion, would have referred to past seasons of perplexity, and have desired--that occurrences "might be seen hereafter," which little minds would sedulously have concealed, as discredit, rather than as conferring conspicuous honour. Ten years after the incidents had occurred to which the following letter refers, in writing to Mr. Southey, among other subjects, I casually expressed a regret, that when I quitted the business of a bookseller, I had not returned him the copy-rights of his "Joan of Arc;" of his two volumes of Poems; and of his letters from Spain and Portugal. The following was his reply. "Wednesday evening, Greta Hall, April 28, 1808. My dear Cottle, ... What you say of my copy-rights affects me very much. Dear Cottle, set your heart at rest on that subject. It ought to be at rest. They were yours; fairly bought, and fairly sold. You bought them on the chance of their success, what no London bookseller would have done; and had they not been bought, they could not have been published at all. Nay, if you had not published 'Joan of Arc,' the poem never would have existed, nor should I, in all probability, ever have obtained that reputation which is the capital on which I subsist, nor that power which enables me to support it.