and Piccadilly, in the guise of Oceanidae, try to console the hat;
but less fortunate than Prometheus, the hat knows it is for ever nailed,
and not to be rescued by Herakles. However, _tout passe, tout casse,
tout lasse_, as Dumas said, for Mr. Quaritch has bought a new hat, and a
journal of London announces that the epic hat is enshrined in glass in
the bibliopole's drawing-room.'

One of the most modern of book-thoroughfares deserves a brief reference
here. Charing Cross Road has for some years been a popular and
successful resort of booksellers and book-hunters. It is within
convenient reach of both the Strand and Holborn, and is only two or
three minutes' walk from Piccadilly Circus. The books offered for sale
here are, for the most part, priced at exceedingly moderate rates. Mr.
Bertram Dobell may be regarded as the chief of the trade here,
possessing, as he does, two large shops well filled with books of all
descriptions. Mr. Dobell's catalogues are very carefully compiled, and
possess a literary flavour by no means common; his lists of
privately-printed books form a most valuable contribution to the
bibliography of the subject. Mr. John Lawler, for many years chief
cataloguer at Puttick's, and more recently at Sotheby's, had a shop in
Charing Cross Road, which he has just given up; and Mr. A. E. Cooper,
who makes a speciality of first editions of modern authors and curious
and out-of-the-way books, both French and English.

[Illustration]

FOOTNOTES:

[176:A] Sewell, Cornhill, and Becket and De Hondt, Strand, were among
the last to use these curious trade signs.

[192:A] The identical book with which Johnson knocked down Osborne,
'Biblia Graeca Septuaginta,' folio, 1594, Frankfort, was at Cambridge in
February, 1812, in the possession of J. Thorpe, bookseller, who
afterwards catalogued it.

[192:B] Timbs, writing in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ in 1868, identified
the house at which Tonson probably lived, and this house was in Timbs's
time a bookseller's. Gray's Inn Lane has become so thoroughly renovated
and improved that it is no longer possible to point to any particular
spot where any celebrity lived.

[201:A] 'One day [writes Lytton] three persons were standing before an
old bookstall in a passage leading from Oxford Street into Tottenham
Court Road. Two were gentlemen; the third, of the class and appearance
of those who more habitually halt at old bookstalls.

'"Look," said one of the gentlemen t