found within its boundaries.
And yet the place "all unabashed" now boasts its bookless self a city!

Mr. Gladstone was, of course, referring to second-hand bookshops.
Neither he nor any other sensible man puts himself out about new
books. When a new book is published, read an old one, was the advice
of a sound though surly critic. It is one of the boasts of letters to
have glorified the term "second-hand," which other crafts have "soiled
to all ignoble use." But why it has been able to do this is obvious.
All the best books are necessarily second-hand. The writers of to-day
need not grumble. Let them "bide a wee." If their books are worth
anything, they, too, one day will be second-hand. If their books are
not worth anything there are ancient trades still in full operation
amongst us--the pastrycooks and the trunkmakers--who must have paper.

But is there any substance in the plaint that nobody now buys books,
meaning thereby second-hand books? The late Mark Pattison, who had
16,000 volumes, and whose lightest word has therefore weight, once
stated that he had been informed, and verily believed, that there were
men of his own University of Oxford who, being in uncontrolled
possession of annual incomes of not less than L500, thought they were
doing the thing handsomely if they expended L50 a year upon their
libraries. But we are not bound to believe this unless we like. There
was a touch of morosity about the late Rector of Lincoln which led him
to take gloomy views of men, particularly Oxford men.

No doubt arguments _a priori_ may readily be found to support the
contention that the habit of book-buying is on the decline. I confess
to knowing one or two men, not Oxford men either, but Cambridge men
(and the passion of Cambridge for literature is a by-word), who, on
the plea of being pressed with business, or because they were going to
a funeral, have passed a bookshop in a strange town without so much as
stepping inside "just to see whether the fellow had anything." But
painful as facts of this sort necessarily are, any damaging inference
we might feel disposed to draw from them is dispelled by a comparison
of price-lists. Compare a bookseller's catalogue of 1862 with one of
the present year, and your pessimism is washed away by the tears which
unrestrainedly flow as you see what _bonnes fortunes_ you have lost. A
young book-buyer might well turn out upon Primrose Hill and bemoan his
youth, after comparing old catalo