My post brings serious intelligence to-day, and of a very pleasing description.  Longman and Company, with a reserve which marks all their proceedings, suddenly inform Mr. Gibson that they desire 1000 of the 8vo edition of St. Ronan’s Well, and the subsequent series of Novels thereunto belonging, for that they have only seven remaining, and wish it to be sent to their printers, and pushed out in three months.  Thus this great house, without giving any previous notice of the state of the sale, expect all to be boot and saddle, horse and away, whenever they give the signal.  In the present case this may do, because I will make neither alteration nor addition till our grand opus, the Improved Edition, goes to press.  But ought we to go to press with this 1000 copies knowing that our project will supersede and render equivalent to waste paper such of them as may not reach the public before our plan is publicly known and begins to operate?  I have, I acknowledge, doubt as to this.  No doubt I feel perfectly justified in letting Longman and Co. look to their own interest, since they have neither consulted me nor attended to mine.  But the loss might extend to the retail booksellers; and to hurt the men through whom my works are ultimately to find their way to the public would be both unjust and impolitic.  On the contrary, if the St. Ronan Series be hurried out immediately, there is time enough perhaps to sell it off before the Improved Edition appears.  In the meantime it appears that the popularity of these works is increasing rather than diminishing, that the measure of securing the copyrights was most judicious, and that, with proper management, things will work themselves round.  Successful first editions are good, but they require exertion and imply fresh risk of reputation.  But repeated editions tell only to the agreeable part of literature.[112]

Longman and Company have also at length opened their oracular jaws on the subject of Bonaparte, and acknowledged its rapid sale, and the probable exhaustion of the present edition.

These tidings, with the success of the Tales, “speak of Africa and golden joys."[113] But the tidings arriving after dinner rather discomposed me.  In the evening I wrote to Cadell and Ballantyne at length, proposing a meeting at my house on Tuesday first, to hold a privy council.

January 9.—­My first reflection was on Napoleon.  I will not be hurried in my corrections of that work; and that I may not be so, I will begin them the instant that I have finished the review.  It makes me tremble to think of the mass of letters I have to look through in order to select all those which affect the subject of Napoleon, and which, in spite of numerous excellent resolutions, I have never separated from the common file from which they are now to be selected.  Confound them! but they are confounded already.  Indolence is a delightful indulgence, but at what a rate we purchase