its before "smashing" it,
there were probably not many reviewers who did not get rid of most of
their books of this kind, if for no other reasons than that no house,
short of a palace, would have held them all. And, in the palmy days of
circulating libraries, the price given by second-hand booksellers for
novels made a very considerable addition to the reviewer's remuneration
or guerdon. But these booksellers would not pay, in proportion, for two
or one volume books--alleging, what no doubt was true, that the
libraries had a lower tariff for them. Further, the short story, now so
popular, was very _un_popular in those days: and library customers would
refuse collections of them with something like indignation or disgust.
Indeed, there are reviewers living who may perhaps pride themselves on
having done something to drive the dislike out and the liking in.

The circulating library itself, though not the creation of the novel,
was very largely extended by it, and helped no doubt very largely to
extend the circulation of the novel in turn. Before it, to some extent,
and long before so-called "public" or "free" libraries, books in general
and novels in particular had been very largely diffused by clubs,
"institutions," and other forms of co-operative individual enterprise,
the bookplates of which will be found in many a copy of an old novel
now. Sometimes these were purely private associations of neighbours:
sometimes they belonged to more or less extensive establishments, like
that defunct "Russell Institution in Great Coram Street," which a great
author, who was its neighbour, once took for an example of desolation;
or the still existing and flourishing "Philosophical" examples in
Edinburgh and Bath. In these latter cases, of course, novels were not
allowed to be the main constituents of the library; in fact in some, but
few, they may have been sternly excluded. On the other hand, the
private-adventure circulating libraries tended more and more, with few
exceptions, to rely on novels only--"Mudie's" and a few more being
exceptions. Very few people, I suppose, ever bought three-volume novels;
and the fact that they went almost wholly to the libraries, and were
there worn to pieces, accounts for the comparative rarity of good
copies. The circulating library has survived both the decease of the
three-volume novel and the competition of the so-called free library.
But it is pretty certain that it was a chief cause--and almost