for relaxation is a necessity: that necessity the railway
literature of the day supplies. But why should the _Times_ grow doleful
when it records the fact?--or rather the half-fact--for the whole truth
is more cheering. The whole truth is, that light reading spreads side by
side with reading of real merit--that the popular scientific discourse,
or history, circulates equally with the novel--not often so trashy after
all--for a cheap book must be a good book or it will not pay; and that
the more readers of light literature you have, the wider is the circle of
readers of better books. A cheap copy of Burns' Poem's might be sold at
a profit; we fear a cheap copy of poems by the critic in the _Times_
would produce a very different result. To write for the people, a man
must write well. The trashy novel, published in three volumes, with a
limited sale will pay; it would not published in a cheap form. Only a
large sale will remunerate; and a large sale is only the result of some
kind of merit.

For proof of this we refer to Paternoster Row. What the press is doing
we can best learn there. It is not a place of great pretensions
externally, but it has a history, and its fame reaches to the uttermost
ends of the earth. Paternoster Row is a short, dark, narrow street,
running parallel with Newgate Street and St. Paul's Church Yard.
Originally it was chiefly patronised by mercers, silkmen, and lacemen.
In the reign of Queen Anne the booksellers moved here from Little
Britain, and here, in spite of a few successful cases of transplantation
to the Strand, or Piccadilly, or Albemarle Street, or Great Marlborough
Street, do they chiefly remain. Here was the printing office of Henry
Samson Woodfall, the printer of the _Public Advertiser_, in which
appeared the celebrated letters of Junius. Some of the firms are very
old. The Rivingtons came here in 1710; the Longmans have been here a
century and a quarter; Simpkins and Marshall are dead and gone, but their
enormous business is still carried on under the old title, and on a
magazine day I believe their sales may amount to three thousand pounds.
How great is the business carried on here is obvious, when we remember
that the Messrs. Longmans' own sale of books has amounted to five
millions in one year, and that the annual distribution of books and
tracts by the Religious Tract Society, in 1853, was nearly twenty-six
millions. When Mr. Routledge could pay Sir Bulwer Lytton 2,00