I had but found that little book here, I
could not have been so hard on the popular
bookseller.

And here, proceeding like a cautious
philosopher, further to define and circumscribe
my cardinal term, I entirely exclude from my
idea of a bookstall, those dusty repositories
of sallow calf-bound volumes, to be found
about Chancery Lane and the Inns of Court.
I never stopped at one of them save once, to
buy a Delolme on the Constitution of England
because Junius praised it, and once again to
get an old Blackstone with Mr. Christian's
notes, which followed as a matter of course.
Threadbare lawyers' clerks hang about them,
and buy second-hand Introductions to Law
Studies and Advice to Young Students, with
which they work themselves into temporary
fits of enthusiasm, and think seriously of
living on oatmeal porridge, in order to afford
money for law books, which they intend to
study all night—having previously given a
farewell supper to all racketty friends and
associates, who might drop in and interfere
with their design. But Fearne on Contingent
Remainders does not stir the spirit like
allusions to the extraordinary rise of Chancellor
Yorke: the first gust of determination dies
away, and the sails soon begin to flap against
the mast. There are some shops—generally
near the hospitals—that sell nothing but
second-hand medical works, where the whole
of the last season's crop of books upon the
German Spas, all addressed "To the Editor
of something (torn out), with the Author's
compliments," are sure to be found. In like
manner there are shops whose spécialité is
books upon divinity, most of which are
not of the sort I care to take into the
country with me, and read under a spreading
beech tree, but, nevertheless worth looking
at when you are in the humour.
These shops generally have a black bust of
somebody over the door. Their volumes are
almost all folios or quartos, and are always in
a good state of preservation, their thick-ribbed
backs being newly oiled and varnished, and
their lettering fresh as if just from the binder.
Stalls exclusively of school-books are not
exactly in my way, but they, too, remind me
pleasantly of school days, and so deserve five
minutes. All of the good old school of school-books
are here, and bound in sheepskin. None
of your new-fangled numbers one, two, three,
four, published by the Commissioners for that,
or the Society for this. This Bonnycastle was
my tutor; this Pinnock was my historian;
this Carpenter was my spelling assistant.
From this Goldsmith's Geography it was
that I learned that the Spaniard is "arrogant
to his inferiors, proud to his equals, and
submissive to his superiors," and that the
Frenchman is "light, inconstant, and
excessively vain." From this Speaker of
Mr. Enfield, of Warrington Academy, I was
taught to prefer cheerfulness to mirth, and
to despise those patricians who would have
endeavoured, by indirect means, to depreciate
the noble Marius in the esteem of the people.
Here, in this sixpenny box—where the
proprietor has cast in an odd volume of Homer,
in the absurd hope of inducing some one to
buy it, not exactly because he understands
Greek, but because it is so cheap—I find an
old, coverless, dog-eared, pen-and-ink
illustrated Virgil, precisely like mine was, and
open it just at that tiresome passage in the
Georgics about a peasant who, for some secret
purpose connected with agriculture, delighted
to drive home his sluggish ass with a mill-stone
or a load of black pitch, which, however, was
no trouble in my estimation compared with
that description of a plough a few pages earlier.
Oh, that plough! Could any but a
misanthrope with a particular spite against boys—
foreseeing that his language would soon be
defunct, and handed over for eternal dissection
in all grammar schools and gymnasia
throughout the world—have ever dreamed of
giving directions in a dozen hexameter lines
for the construction of a plough? How I
strove to reset its dislocated parts, which
would not be brought together by any rules
of syntax that I knew of; and finally gave
it up, convinced that it never could be a
description of any plough, unless it were the
rude ignorant contrivance of some soldier of
the tenth legion, to whom that pattern of all
the dedicatory virtues, Augustus Cæsar, had
given the house and land of some unlucky
Mantuan farmer, for his share of the plunder.
Ah, well! school-books are a subject by
themselves; and I did not set out to talk
about them.

A man who confesses to being fond of
a bookstall might be supposed, à fortiori, to
be quite happy in Holywell Street, London,
where the old, worn-out, pauper class of
books have gained a permanent settlement.
He might be pictured as ready at any
time to brave the dangers of the narrow
pass between the churches of St. Mary-le-Strand
and St. Clement's Danes, so stoutly
defended at its mouth by dealers in old
clothes, (who sally out and compel the
passer-by to listen, though he may be as
anxious as the wedding guest to be at the
feast) in order to spend a whole sunny afternoon
in that wild garden of seedy literature.
But such places are only a bewilderment to
him. It is as if you should set an active
sportsman to shoot in an aviary. He does
not, to be sure, care to stay at saleshops,
where he is jostled by carpenters bidding for
slop-made tools, for the sake of a few books
which are always to be found there, imbedded
among planes, and saws, and fishing-tackle,
and rusty old pistols. There is nothing to
speak of there, but Guthrie's Geography,
Walker's Gazetteer, 1793, and some old, odd
volumes of the Edinburgh Review. Nor at
rag-shops, to overhaul that small salvage from
the waste-paper stock, consisting of old hymn
books, Annual Registers, Dodsley's selections