The good Cottle—young in 1795, a publisher, and unhappily a poet—rendered more important service to the two young men than that of smoothing down their ruffled tempers after this incident. Southey, in conjunction with Lovell, had already published a slender volume of verse. The pieces by Southey recall his schoolboy joys and sorrows, and tell of his mother’s tears, his father’s death, his friendship with “Urban,” his love of “Ariste,” lovely maid! his delight in old romance, his discipleship to Rousseau. They are chiefly of interest as exhibiting the diverse literary influences to which a young writer of genius was exposed in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Here the couplet of Pope reappears, and hard by the irregular ode as practised by Akenside, the elegy as written by Gray, the unrhymed stanza which Collins’s _Evening_ made a fashion, the sonnet to which Bowles had lent a meditative grace and the rhymeless measures imitated by Southey from Sayers, and afterwards made popular by his _Thalaba_. On the last page of this volume appear “Proposals for publishing by subscription _Joan of Arc_;” but subscriptions came slowly in. One evening Southey read for Cottle some books of _Joan_. “It can rarely happen,” he writes “that a young author should meet with a bookseller as inexperienced and as ardent as himself.” Cottle offered to publish the poem in quarto, to make it the handsomest book ever printed in Bristol, to give the author fifty copies for his subscribers, and fifty pounds to put forthwith into his purse. Some dramatic attempts had recently been made by Southey, _Wat Tyler_, of which we shall hear more at a later date, and the _Fall of Robespierre_, undertaken by Coleridge, Lovell, and Southey, half in sport—each being pledged to produce an act in twenty-four hours. These were now forgotten, and all his energies were given to revising and in part recasting _Joan_. In six weeks his epic had been written; its revision occupied six months.