God love you, my dear Southey, and your affectionate
My kind love to Edith. Let me hear from you, and do not be angry with me that I don't answer your letters regularly.
MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--I shall give up this Newspaper business; it is too, too fatiguing. I have attended the Debates twice, and the first time I was twenty-five hours in activity, and that of a very unpleasant kind; and the second time, from ten in the morning till four o'clock the next morning. I am sure that you will excuse my silence, though indeed after two such letters from you I cannot scarcely excuse it myself. First of the book business. I find a resistance which I did not expect to the _anonymousness_ of the publication. Longman seems confident that a work on such a subject without a name would not do. Translations and perhaps Satires are, he says, the only works that booksellers now venture on _without a name_. He is very solicitous to have your "Thalaba," and wonders (most wonderful!) that you do not write a novel. That would be the thing! and truly, if by no more pains than a "St. Leon"[226] requires you could get four hundred pounds!! or half the money, I say so too! If we were together we might easily _toss up_ a novel, to be published in the name of one of us, or _two_, if that were all, and then christen 'em by lots. As sure as ink flows in my pen, by help of an amanuensis I could write a volume a week--and Godwin got four hundred pounds! for it--think of that, Master Brooks. I hope that some time or other you will write a novel on that subject of yours! I mean the "Rise and Progress of a _Laugher_"--Le Grice in your eye--the effect of Laughing on taste, manners, morals, and happiness! But as to the Jacobin Book, I must wait till I hear from you. Phillips would be very glad to engage you to write a school book for him, the History of Poetry in all nations, about 400 pages; but this, too, _must_ have your name. He would give sixty pounds. If poor dear Burnett were with you, he might do it under your eye and with your instructions as well as you or I could do it, but it is _the name_. Longman remarked acutely enough, "The booksellers scarcely pretend to judge the merits of the _book_, but we know the _saleableness_ of the name! and as they continue to buy most books on the calculation of a _first_ edition of a thousand copies, they are seldom much mistaken; for the name gives them the excuse for sending it to all the Gemmen in Great Britain and the Colonies, from whom they have standing orders for new books of reputation." This is the secret why books published by country booksellers, or by authors on their own account, so seldom succeed.