y expanded,
but its representatives have sprung up in every district, whilst many of
the older ones have forsaken the limits of the City, and pitched their
tents in Greater London. For centuries bookselling and publishing
flourished side by side in St. Paul's Churchyard, Fleet Street, and
their immediate neighbourhoods.

[Illustration: _St. Paul's Churchyard, 1606. From the Crace
Collection._]

Of all the old bookselling localities close to the heart of London, none
were more famous than Little Britain and Moorfields. Three years before
the Great Fire of London--in 1663--Sorbiere, in his 'Journey to
England,' made the following observation: 'I am not to forget the vast
number of booksellers' shops I have observed in London: for besides
those who are set up here and there in the City, they have their
particular quarters, such as St. Paul's Churchyard and Little Britain,
where there is twice as many as in the Rue Saint Jacque in Paris, and
who have each of them two or three warehouses.' The bookselling zenith
of Little Britain was attained in the seventeenth century; it may almost
be said to have commenced with the reign of Charles I., and to have
begun a sort of retrogression with the Hanoverian succession. But there
were printers and booksellers here at the latter part of the sixteenth
century. From a newspaper published in this district in 1664, we learn
that no less than 464 pamphlets were published here during four years.
It was a sort of seventeenth-century combination of the Paternoster Row
and Fleet Street of the present day. It is the place where, according to
a widely circulated statement, first made in Richardson's 'Remarks on
Paradise Lost,' 1734, an Earl of Dorset accidentally discovered, when on
a book-hunt in 1667, a work hitherto unknown to him, entitled 'Paradise
Lost.' He is said to have bought a copy, and the bookseller begged him
to recommend it to his friends, as the copies lay on his hand like so
much wastepaper. The noble Earl showed his copy to Dryden, who is
reported to have exclaimed: 'This man cuts us all out, and the ancients
too.' Though this anecdote may be apocryphal, certain it is the poem is
in a way connected with the neighbourhood, inasmuch as Simmons' shop was
in Aldersgate Street. In addition to this fact, Richardson also tells us
that Milton lodged for some time in Little Britain with Millington, the
famous book-auctioneer, who had then quitted the rostrum and followed
the more peac