t is not unfamiliar to me; I come to it like the son to his
father, like the bird to its nest. (Singularly inappropriate comparison,
but I am in such excellent humour to-day; humour is everything. It is said
that the tiger will sometimes play with the lamb! Let us play.) We have the
villa well in our mind. The father who goes to the city in the morning, the
grown-up girls waiting to be married, the big drawing-room where they play
waltz music, and talk of dancing parties. But waltzes will not entirely
suffice, nor even tennis; the girls must read. Mother cannot keep a censor
(it is as much as she can do to keep a cook, housemaid, and page-boy),
besides the expense would be enormous, even if nothing but shilling and
two-shilling novels were purchased. Out of such circumstances the
circulating library was hatched.

The villa made known its want, and art fell on its knees. Pressure was put
on the publishers, and books were published at 31s. 6d.; the dirty, outside
public was got rid of, and the villa paid its yearly subscription, and had
nice large handsome books that none but the _elite_ could obtain, and
with them a sense of being put on a footing of equality with my Lady This
and Lady That, and certainty that nothing would come into the hands of dear
Kate and Mary and Maggie that they might not read, and all for two guineas
a year. English fiction became pure, and the garlic and assafoetida with
which Byron, Fielding, and Ben Jonson so liberally seasoned their works,
and in spite of which, as critics say, they were geniuses, have disappeared
from our literature. English fiction became pure, dirty stories were to be
heard no more, were no longer procurable. But at this point human nature
intervened; poor human nature! when you pinch it in in one place it bulges
out in another, after the fashion of a lady's figure. Human nature has from
the earliest time shown a liking for dirty stories; dirty stories have
formed a substantial part of every literature (I employ the words "dirty
stories" in the circulating library sense); therefore a taste for dirty
stories may be said to be inherent in the human animal. Call it a disease
if you will--an incurable disease--which, if it is driven inwards, will
break out in an unexpected quarter in a new form and with redoubled
virulence. This is exactly what has happened. Actuated by the most laudable
motives, Mudie cut off our rations of dirty stories, and for forty years we
were apparently