of fugitive pieces, by several hands, dirty,
fly-blown, imperfect volumes of Smollett or
Fielding which no cheesemonger could use,
without offending his customers. Their
proprietors have an exaggerated notion of the
worth of old rubbish, founded, I believe, upon
traditions of little dirty volumes having been
picked up at such places, and after much
scrubbing being found to have valuable
autographs on their covers, about which the seller
subsequently went to law, and was sternly
adjudged to abide by his bargain: or perhaps
they have heard that there are bibliolaters
addicted to the worship of fetishes, appearing
to the vulgar eye to be equally unworthy of
adoration; and so, in despair of ever getting
at the secret of what constitutes their value,
have resolved to protect themselves in a
general suspicion of bookbuyers, and a
determination to ask that maximum price, which,
as a buyer itself, it is the rag-shop's proudest
boast to give.

All these ninth parts of a bookstall my
bibliophile passes by: for he is no literary
glutton. Any bookstall whose outside stock
a man, with moderate haste, might glance at
in ten minutes, will content him. One such
I know, which is my oldest favourite, and
which comes up, exactly, to my ideal of what
such a loitering place should be. Not wholly
in the City's stir and noise, nor quite beyond
it, is this my beloved bookstall. It is in a
narrow passage, considerably frequented
during the day; but it lies snugly in a little
nook, so that any person approaching it must
do so deliberately, and because he has
determined it beforehand. This is good; for
there are some who will linger just because
the place lies in their way, and who, as they
would have preferred a picture-shop
themselves, never dream that they are keeping
away more serious devotees.

It was a smaller place when I first knew
it—just such a stall as Lackington or Hutton
might have begun with; but I was less
fastidious then. An old shoemaker had it first
—a thin, lame old man, with grey whiskers.
He had renounced his legitimate business, in
defiance of the solemn warning of the Roman
satirist, and betaken himself to the cobbling
and patching of old books, in the hope of
getting his livelihood that way; and if living
on bread and water, washing his own shirt,
and mending his own boots, would have
enabled him to hold out, I believe he would
have maintained the siege to this day. I
used to see him in the little shop, reading,
with a pair of spectacles with broad black
rims, which he wore very low down his nose.
I bought of him Defoe's Account of the
Plague, which I read and liked very much;
till I found out that the author's part in it
was all a fiction—a discovery which made the
whole seem to me so much like a string of
falsehoods, that I could hardly reconcile it
with my ideas of ethics. The old shoemaker,
to my astonishment, asked me about it next
time I stopped there; and answered my
objections, defending the author with very
subtle casuistry; but though I could not
answer him, I was not convinced. I always
felt myself free to loiter there after that—
whether I bought anything or not—for I had
doubt in approaching a new place, whether I
looked sufficiently like a buyer of books, to
test a bookstall keeper's patience; and not
without reason, for I had not forgotten an
insulting bookseller, who once snatched out
of my hand a copy of Mungo Park's Travels,
and bade me "go on about my arrant," adding
in the vain hope of soothing my wounded
pride, the words "there's a good lad." I told
him, to annoy him, that I was just thinking
of buying it; but that I wouldn't have it
now at any price, at the same time holding
up half-a-crown in proof of my power to do
so, if I had pleased. But he did not believe
me, and only repeated his offensive admonition,
which stung me to the quick, insomuch
that I never went down that street again, till
a trustworthy spy informed me that the
bookseller had gone away, and that his shop was
now devoted to cutlery and hardware; a
circumstance that induced me to hope that he
had failed or that his goods had been seized
for rent. My old cobbler was very patient;
but the enemy was patient too and pressed him
closely. Want of capital was his trouble.
He had a board outside with the words "Old
Books Bought and Exchanged," but when
people came to offer him bargains, he was
frequently obliged to decline them. Some of
them told him saucily, that they didn't
believe he bought books at all, and one (to my
knowledge) to whom he had offered a ridiculously
low price, in the certainty that it would
be rejected, took him at his word, and
compelled him to admit that he had been trifling
with him. I bought of him, all in one
week, Falconer's Shipwreck—from a picture
in which I learnt the names of parts of a
ship in order to astonish an old sailor that I
knew—Quarles's Emblems and the Lives of
Washington and Lafayette in one volume,
and a portable Cyclopædia. These purchases,
I believe, enabled him to stave off his
bankruptcy for another fortnight. But he gave
in at last, and went back into Huntingdonshire;
being, as he told me the first time I
talked with him, "a Huntingdonshire man,
and" (as he invariably added, for he was not
ashamed of his craft) "a shoemaker by
trade."

I was sorry when he was gone, and
hoped that the shop might be let for the
same business again. We had no cheap and
good magazines then. There was a number
of twopenny publications called the Olio,
the Scorpion, the Casket, the Gleaner, the
Spy, and so forth; but they were very dull
reading, being only extracts from Biographies
and Histories, meagre descriptions of places,
and odds and ends from moral writers to fill up
the space at the end. Then there were penny