Bolton, Oxford, Sheffield, and Winchester, may
be considerably aided in their efforts.

In the first place, it is well worth while for
us all chiefly to understand that a Free
Public Library never can become anything
much better than a large literary scrap
cupboard, if it is to depend for its books upon
choice donations. If no mind presides over
its formation, if no money is placed regularly
at the disposal of a committee, for the
direct purpose of buying books upon a well-
considered system, the thing formed is not a
library, but a bookstall, in which all the
chance-collected volumes are to be read
instead of bought, by droppers-in. Now, it
is provided by the Public Libraries' Act of
eighteen hundred and fifty, as most people
know, that a town corporation may apply a
halfpenny rate to the establishment of a free
library if, upon a poll, two-thirds of the
voting burgesses consent. But it is provided
that this money shall be spent on library
buildings, salaries, coals, candles, anything
and everything except the one thing needful—
books. The Act gives no authority to
purchase books with borough funds, a curious
error of omission, which we all must wish to
see corrected in the next sessions of Parliament.
Liverpool has for its library a special
act, and Manchester, by a special clause, is
able to spend town money on books as well
as upon bookshelves, but Bolton has been
driven by this blunder to the necessity of
adopting troublesome machinery for the
supply of the town wants, and other towns
are likely to be seriously trammelled in their
efforts for self-education.

Donations to the Manchester Free Library
have been extremely liberal, but books
presented have, nevertheless, borne no sensible
proportion to the books required. The library
is, at the end of the first year, in efficient
working order—a library with sense and light
in it, not a dead lump of volumes, but its
efficiency is mainly the result of a judicious
use of money in the purchase of those books
that were of the most sterling character, those
that secured the fair supply of right material
in each kind of study, or that were in other
ways peculiarly suited to the exigencies of
the town. Thus in Manchester one of the
most popular novels is Scott's Kenilworth.
That work in the lending library had thirty-
four readers in six months; but Mr. Sewell's
Rudolph the Voyager had in the same period
two readers more. Of all histories, Macaulay's
History of England is in most request—
except Whitaker's History of Manchester.
Then again there is a taste in Manchester
for works upon the steam-engine, and upon
chemistry, which must be met by books of a
class that would be little sought at present
in some other towns. There is a solidity of
taste about the mass of Manchester readers,
to which this report bears curious testimony.
Let us note a fact or two conerning it:—

The library, as all the country knows,
consists of a reference department, or reading-
room, containing books that are not to go out
of doors, and a lending library. In the
former more than sixty thousand, and in the
latter nearly eighty thousand volumes were
consulted during the past year. The reference
library is used by persons of all classes, the
lending library also by all classes, but chiefly
by working-men and women. Of two thousand
active borrowers of books, we are told
that about one thousand are warehousemen,
packers, and others employed in warehouses,
artisans, mechanics, and machinists, or mill
hands, being men; ninety are mill hands of
the other sex; two hundred and thirty are
shop assistants, male or female, dressmakers,
&c.; a hundred are clerks; sixty are shopkeepers;
three hundred and fifty are boys at
home, at school, or employed in shops, including
pupil teachers; there are twenty female
pupil teachers; and the rest are persons of
superior station or whose position was not
ascertained.

What now is the kind of reading favoured
by these people? My Lord Tomnoddy,
lounging on his club sofa, refuses to believe
it, when he is told that these brave people,
meaning to work with their heads as well as
with their hands, use books that are taken
by them from the Manchester Free Lending
Library in the proportion following: In
literature—including poetry and fiction, essays,
literary history, and encyclopaedias—each
volume is read, on an average, fifteen times
a year. Works upon theology and philosophy
are next in request; in that class each work
has been read, on an average, nine times.
In history and biography every work has had
an average of eight readers; the scientific
works have had an average of seven readings
apiece; and each work on law, politics, or
commerce may, in the same way, be said to
have been borrowed twice. Scientific and
other books borrowed by working men, that
bear upon their trades, are studied carefully;
epitomes are sometimes made by them at
home; and one or two have been, or are
being, bodily copied into household
manuscript!

There is a fine earnestness about all this.
Then there is something very natural and
amusing in the results of the librarian's notes
as to the books most in request in each
department. The reference library is crowded
in the evening by working men; and
their great delight and refreshment appears
to consist in an escape from routine life
to dreams of romance or peril, in relieving
the monotony of toil with tales of battle,
shipwreck, or adventure. In a word, the
imagination, even in Manchester, refuses
to be crushed. The pleasure book most
read, during the first six months after the
library opened, was—the Arabian Nights.
The weary warehousemen, mill hands, and
shopkeepers spent their evenings with
Haroun al Raschid. The next best books for