handed, and he would smile gaily, oblivious for a time of bare
cupboard and inward cravings.

_A propos_ of a literary man turning bookseller, the experiment has
often been tried, but it has generally failed. Second-hand bookselling
seems to be a frequent experiment after the failures of other trades
and callings. We have known grocers, greengrocers, coal-dealers,
pianoforte-makers, printers, bookbinders, cheap-jacks, in London, adopt
the selling of books as a means of livelihood. Sometimes--and several
living examples might be cited--the experiment is a success, but
frequently a failure. The knowledge of old books is not picked up in a
month or a year. The misfortune which seems to dog the footsteps of many
men in every move they make, does not fail to pursue them in
bookselling. Some of them might almost say with Fulmer, in Cumberland's
'West Indian' (1771): 'I have beat through every quarter of the
compass . . . I have blustered for prerogatives, I have bellowed for
freedom, I have offered to serve my country, I have engaged to betray
it . . . I have talked treason, writ treason. . . . And here I set up as
a bookseller, but men leave off reading, and if I were to turn butcher I
believe they'd leave off eating.'

There can be no doubt about the fact that Englishmen as a rule do not
attach sufficient importance to book-buying. If the better-class
tradesman, or professional man, spends a few pounds at Christmas or on
birthday occasions, he feels that he has become a patron of literature.
How many men, who are getting L1,000 a year, spend L1 per month on
books? The library of the average middle-class person is in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred the cruelest possible commentary on his
intelligence, and, as a matter of fact, if it contains a couple of
volumes worthy of the name of books, their presence is more often than
not an accidental one. A few volumes of the _Sunday at Home_, the
_Leisure Hour_, _Cassell's Magazine_, or perhaps a few other monthly
periodicals, carefully preserved during the twelve months of their
issue, and bound up at the end of the year--with such stuff as this is
the average Englishman's bookcase filled. Mark Pattison has gone so far
as to declare that while the aggregate wealth of the United Kingdom is
many times more than it was one hundred and fifty years ago, the circle
of book-buyers, of the lovers of literature, is certainly not larger, if
it be not absolutely smaller. It may be urged th