es, but their
felonious editions of eighteenth-century authors still abound. Mr.
Gladstone, I need scarcely say, was careful in his Home Rule Bill
(which was denounced by thousands who never read a line of it) to
withdraw copyright from the scope of action of his proposed Dublin
Parliament.

There are nearly eleven hundred brief character-sketches in Dunton's
book, of all sorts and kinds, but with a preference for bookish
people, divines, both of the Establishment and out of it, printers and
authors. Sometimes, indeed, the description is short enough, and tells
one very little. To many readers, references so curt to people of whom
they never heard, and whose names are recorded nowhere else, save on
their mouldering grave-stones, may seem tedious and trivial, but for
others they will have a strange fascination. Here are a few examples:

'Affable _Wiggins_. His conversation is general but never
impertinent.

'The kind and golden _Venables_. He is so good a man, and so truly
charitable, he that will write of him, must still write more.

'Mr. _Bury_--my old neighbour in Redcross Street. He is a plain
honest man, sells the best coffee in all the neighbourhood, and
lives in this world like a spiritual stranger and pilgrim in a
foreign country.

'Anabaptist (alias _Elephant_) _Smith_. He was a man of great
sincerity and happy contentment in all circumstances of life.'

If an affection for passages of this kind be condemned as trivial, and
akin to the sentimentalism of the man in Calverley's poem who wept
over a box labelled 'This side up,' I will shelter myself behind
Carlyle, who was evidently deeply moved, as his review of Boswell's
Johnson proves, by the life-history of Mr. F. Lewis, 'of whose birth,
death, and whole terrestrial _res gestae_ this only, and, strange
enough, this actually, survives--"Sir, he lived in London, and hung
loose upon society. _Stat_ PARVI _hominis umbra_."' On that peg
Carlyle's imagination hung a whole biography.

Dunton, who was the son of the Rector of Aston Clinton, was
apprenticed, about 1675, to a London bookseller. He had from the
beginning a great turn both for religion and love. He, to use his own
phrase, 'sat under the powerful ministry of Mr. Doolittle.' 'One
Lord's day, and I remember it with sorrow, I was to hear the Rev. Mr.
Doolittle, and it was then and there the beautiful Rachel Seaton gave
me that fatal wound.'

The first book Dunton ever p