pied by many eminent law publishers and
booksellers, and of late years by the late Mr. Henry Butterworth, who
became himself the Queen's law publisher.

[237:A] One of the reviewers of Nichols' 'Literary Anecdotes' says: 'How
often have we seen him standing betwixt these, bidding "his friends
good-morrow with a cheerful face," and pulling down his ruffles, already
too long, till they covered his fingers. Davies had, even while in
common conversation, as much of the old school of acting in his manner
as his friend Gibson had upon the stage; though he is said not to have
been so pompous as Berry, to whose parts he succeeded; and Berry, in
this respect, was thought to have declined from Bridgewater.'

[237:B] Now covered by Charing Cross Hospital. At the commencement of
the third quarter of the sixteenth century, Thomas Colwell, a
bookseller, had a shop at the sign of 'St. John the Evangelist,' in St.
Martin's parish, near Charing-Cross, and a shop with the same sign in
Fleet Street, near the Conduit. It must be remembered that at this
period Holborn and Charing Cross were quite suburban villages, the
former noteworthy as the thoroughfare from Newgate to Tyburn, and the
latter as a sort of halfway place of stoppage between the City and
Westminster.

[241:A] Not quite so unprecedented as Mr. Dibdin thought. The _Grub
Street Journal_ of February 3, 1731, contained an entire page devoted to
the books advertisement of Tom Osborne, a much more remarkable feat, all
things considered, than Thorpe's.

[Illustration]

WOMEN AS BOOK-COLLECTORS.

IT seems a curiously contradictory fact that, although Englishwomen are
on the whole greater readers than men, they are, as book-collectors or
bibliophiles, an almost unknown quantity. In France this is not the
case, and several books have been published there on the subject of _les
femmes bibliophiles_. An analysis of their book-possessions, however,
leads one to the conclusion that with them their sumptuously-bound
volumes partake more of the nature of bijouterie than anything else.
Many of the earlier of these bibliophiles were unendowed with any keen
appreciation for intellectual pursuits, and they collected pretty books
just as they would collect pretty articles of feminine decoration. They
therefore form a little community which can scarcely be included in the
higher category of intellectual book-collectors. It would be much easier
to assert that Englishwomen differ from