For the buying of books, it is the cheaper shops where I most often prowl.
There is in London a district around Charing Cross Road where almost every
shop has books for sale. There is a continuous rack along the sidewalk,
each title beckoning for your attention. You recall the class of
street-readers of whom Charles Lamb wrote--"poor gentry, who, not having
wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open
stalls." It was on some such street that these folk practiced their
innocent larceny. If one shopkeeper frowned at the diligence with which
they read "Clarissa," they would continue her distressing adventures across
the way. By a lingering progress up the street, "Sir Charles Grandison"
might be nibbled down--by such as had the stomach--without the outlay of
a single penny. As for Gibbon and the bulbous historians, though a whole
perusal would outlast the summer and stretch to the colder months, yet with
patience they could be got through. However, before the end was come even a
hasty reader whose eye was nimble on the page would be blowing on his nails
and pulling his tails between him and the November wind.

But the habit of reading at the open stalls was not only with the poor. You
will remember that Mr. Brownlow was addicted. Really, had not the Artful
Dodger stolen his pocket handkerchief as he was thus engaged upon his book,
the whole history of Oliver Twist must have been quite different. And Pepys
himself, Samuel Pepys, F.R.S., was guilty. "To Paul's Church Yard," he
writes, "and there looked upon the second part of Hudibras, which I buy
not, but borrow to read." Such parsimony is the curse of authors. To thumb
a volume cheaply around a neighborhood is what keeps them in their garrets.
It is a less offence to steal peanuts from a stand. Also, it is recorded in
the life of Beau Nash that the persons of fashion of his time, to pass a
tedious morning "did divert themselves with reading in the booksellers'
shops." We may conceive Mr. Fanciful Fopling in the sleepy blink of those
early hours before the pleasures of the day have made a start, inquiring
between his yawns what latest novels have come down from London, or whether
a new part of "Pamela" is offered yet. If the post be in, he will prop
himself against the shelf and--unless he glaze and nod--he will read
cheaply for an hour. Or my Lady Betty, having taken the waters in the
pump-room and lent her ear to such gossip as is abroad so early, i