and eyebrows; like that libellous effigy of
Shakspere which I have never forgiven Ben
Jonson for certifying to. In vain for me does
the cunning bookseller mark dirty,
broken-backed, title-pageless, little books—trash with
which the priest and barber in Don Quixote
would have made short work—as quaint,
curious, or very scarce. Verbiage, and pedantry,
and silly conceits do not, to my thinking,
improve by age; nor are they, unhappily, so very
scarce, that I should pay more for them than
for wiser books. Bridget Elia might have
trusted me with our last halfcrown, secure
that no fine old copy of anything should
ever tempt me to return with an inedible
substitute for the expected supper; nor would
I have refused forgiveness to that meek and
faithful maiden, though she had seized upon
old Mateo Aleman's Spanish Rogue, and cast
him, fluttering like one of those belligerent
tomes in the frontispiece to Boileau's Lahin,
into the street below. Such books are
properly sold with fine old paintings and rudely
carven and worm-eaten old violins, in Soho.
Their sellers are harpies, vampires, fosterers
of human frailty for their own profit; they
sit like spiders ready to dart out of their
secret ambush, and pounce upon a victim
before he has time to put on his spectacles;
not like mild, unobtrusive philanthropists,
who spread their feast of knowledge for all to
taste, and taste again, before they buy.

But though I steer clear of this Scylla, the
curiosity shop, yet do I hold in equal horror
that Charybdis, the popular bookstall, whose
books are all bound in gaudy cloth, and are
vaguely stated on the title-page to be "printed
for the booksellers."There is no excitement
here; no search for bargains; no curiosity
to see what their authors are. I know
them all before-hand, and their prices. That
clumsy little row of novels, from the Farmer
of Inglewood Forest down to the Red Rover,
look cheap at ninepence each; better print
or paper never came perhaps to Leipsic
bookfair; but I know too well by what simple
method all novels, long or short, in that series,
are brought into one compass to have any
interest in them. Clarissa Harlowe was wont
to be a little bulkier than Dr. Johnson's
Rasselas, if I am not mistaken. My Arabian
Nights' Entertainments were a continuous
feast, and not a wretched mouthful, as I find
them here. Three days I wept, in my youth,
over the sorrows and perplexities of Amanda
and Oscar Fitzalan, while here I may find
those virtuous Children of the Abbey made
free and happy in as many hours. That
inexhaustible stereotyped edition of Shakspere in
one volume, I do believe is honest. The text,
perhaps, is mangled by the players, yet I
think all the plays are there. But I abhor
that edition. I hate its creaking back, its
press-worn portrait of the author, its faint
and smudged diamond type. I would not read
it out of an Austrian dungeon. No exception
do I make in favour of that waistcoat-pocket
edition of Burns, prose and poetry, with its
skeleton engravings, its memoir, notes, and
laudatory verses, all complete; nor do I love
Young's Night Thoughts enough to run the
risk of getting nearsighted in reading them.
There was a time when I looked enviously at
those very blue and crimson books, with their
backs and edges glittering with gold which
the popular bookshop calls suitable for birthday
presents, &c. They used to be arranged
upon a table in our schoolroom when we
broke up for the holidays, that all might
see them before we drew lots. How I coveted
once that Paul and Virginia and the Indian
Cottage (those inseparable companions), with
a copper-plate engraving of Paul, naked-footed,
carrying Virginia over the brook, done upon
thick whitey-brown paper, on which the ink
would run so, if you tried to write your name
on the back of it, that the letters all came
together, and a blot would spread like a fire
in the prairies. Mr. Goss, my schoolmaster
(who was on the whole such a good schoolmaster,
as far as his limited powers, and still
more limited knowledge went, that I would
not for the world, call him old Goss), held up
that very Evenings at Home, by Dr. Aikin
and Mrs. Barbauld, once when we were alone,
and asked me how I should like to have it?
I fondly regarding the question as an earnest
that the book would fall to me  but it didn't.
Master Barlow got it and prized it not—
offering it to me, soon after the holidays, for
a complete string of livery buttons, which he
had set his heart upon and wouldn't hear of
any substitute. There was a little book—I
do not see it here, and indeed I do not think
it properly belonged to the popular bookstall
—which was my prize, and which I should
like to meet again. It was called the Dangers
of Dutchland. How euphoniously did that
alliterative title strike my ear, as the prize
list was read over. I had a presentiment that
I should win it, and I did win it. It was a
little drab volume in boards, neat enough;
but not so delicate as my Cowper, which I had
never been able to read with comfort for fear
of soiling it, and which I had at last come to
regard, not as a book to be read, but as a
something to be kept clean.

I have read some circulating libraries
through since then, and a few hundreds of
other books, of which, I fancy, I might now
read a good many and never suspect that I
had seen them before; but I am quite ready
to go through an examination on the
Dangers of Dutchland now, though I lost
it somehow years and years ago. Ask me
about the diligence that overturned, and
what the travellers said about the roads
generally, and how the Dutch boatmen
measure distances by the number of pipes
they smoke. Request me to relate that
affecting little episode of the young woman
who went mad about tulips; or beg me, in the
style of Mrs. Mangnall's questions, state
generally my recollections of that work. If