better book?

Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret it so much for the
weightier kinds of reading--the Paradise Lost, or Comus, he could have
_read_ to him--but he missed the pleasure of skimming over with his
own eye a magazine, or a light pamphlet.

I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some
cathedral alone, and reading _Candide_.

I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having been once
detected--by a familiar damsel--reclined at my ease upon the grass, on
Primrose Hill (her Cythera), reading--_Pamela_. There was nothing in
the book to make a man seriously ashamed at the exposure; but as she
seated herself down by me, and seemed determined to read in company,
I could have wished it had been--any other book. We read on very
sociably for a few pages; and, not finding the author much to her
taste, she got up, and--went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it to thee
to conjecture, whether the blush (for there was one between us) was
the property of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From me you
shall never get the secret.

I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot settle my
spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian minister, who was generally to be
seen upon Snow-hill (as yet Skinner's-street _was not_), between the
hours of ten and eleven in the morning, studying a volume of Lardner.
I own this to have been a strain of abstraction beyond my reach. I
used to admire how he sidled along, keeping clear of secular contacts.
An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot, or a bread basket, would
have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master of, and have
left me worse than indifferent to the five points.

There is a class of street-readers, whom I can never contemplate
without affection--the poor gentry, who, not having wherewithal to buy
or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open stalls--the owner,
with his hard eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, and
thinking when they will have done. Venturing tenderly, page after
page, expecting every moment when he shall interpose his interdict,
and yet unable to deny themselves the gratification, they "snatch
a fearful joy." Martin B----, in this way, by daily fragments,
got through two volumes of Clarissa, when the stall-keeper damped
his laudable ambition, by asking him (it was in his younger days)
whether he meant to purchase the work. M. declares, that under no
circumstances of his life did he ever