Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/524

482 PROVINCIAL BOOKSELLERS. ledger, and the rank residuum of a life of gossip." This is certainly " slashing criticism" with a vengeance : Cottle based the value of his book upon the ground of his having been a bookseller, and to taunt him with the fact is as unmanly as the whole description of the work is false. He lays the slightest possible stress upon the assistance he had been able to render the illustrious authors pecuniarily, and only brings it for- ward at all as furnishing matter for literary history ; and to most students the literary history of the early struggles of genius does possess the highest interest. Cottle was certainly unskilled in the art of composition, and was undoubtedly garrulous, but the gossip anent such writers, when prompted, as in this case, by truth and affection, is worth tomes of disquisitions upon their virtues or their faults. Joseph Cottle died as recently as 1854, and his memory is already half-forgotten, and yet had we wished to close our annals of the " trade" by tributes paid by illustrious writers to the worth and integrity of its members, we could find none more fitting than the letters of two famous poets to an obscure provincial bookseller. " DEAR COTTLE, On the blank leaf of my poems I can most appropriately write my acknowledg- ments to you, for your too disinterested conduct in the purchase of them Had it not been for you none, perhaps, of them would have been published, and some not written. " Your obliged and affectionate friend, "S. T. COLERIDGE." Again : " Do you suppose, Cottle, that I have forgotten those true and most essential acts of friendship