e latter feature
lends a high additional weight to the matter, and multiplies
inquirers.

We must, however, in justice to this branch of the topic and to our
readers, refrain from further pursuit of the discussion of it, as its
adequate treatment would absorb a monograph to the full extent as
ample as the present, and such a Manual is in point of fact a
desideratum--one, too, which the improved state of bibliographical
knowledge would assist in rendering much more satisfactory than was
formerly possible.

The _Rolls of Collectors_ by the present writer afford a convenient
view of the different classes of society in the now United Kingdom,
which from the outset to the present day have created, during unequal
periods of duration, more or less noteworthy centres of literary or
bibliographical gatherings, from the Harley, Roxburghe, Heber, or Huth
level to that of the owner--often not less to be admired or
commended--of the humble shelf-ful of volumes. Here names occur
associated with the most widely varied aims in respect to scope and
compass, yet all in a certain measure participating in the credit of
admitting to their homes products of intellectual industry and
ingenuity beyond such matter as Family Bibles, Directories, Railway
Guides, Charles Lamb's _Biblia-a-Biblia_, and sixpenny or threepenny
editions of popular authors, which constitute the staple decorations
of the average British middle-class household in this nonagenarian
nineteenth century.

So early as the time of the later Stuarts, a movement seems to have
commenced both in England and Scotland, not only in the chief centres,
but in provincial towns, for the education of the middle class, and
even of the higher grade of agriculturists, who sent their children to
schools, and at the same time, in the absence of circulating
libraries, improved their own minds by the exchange of books, as we
perceive in contemporary diaries and correspondence; and Macaulay
doubtless overcolours the ignorance and debasement of the bulk of
society about the period of the Revolution of 1688, apparently in
order to maintain a cue with which he had started. The Diary of John
Richards, a farmer at Warmwell in Dorsetshire, 1697-1702, is an
unimpeachable witness on the other side; it is printed in the
_Retrospective Review_, 1853.

It was about the same date that we find even in Scotland a project for
establishing throughout the country, in every parish, Reference or
Lending Libra