might send inquiries for
his works.

'Some county squire to Lintot goes,
Inquires for Swift in verse and prose.
Says Lintot, "I have heard the name,
He died a year ago." "The same."
He searches all the shops in vain:
"Sir, you may find them in Duck Lane."'

And Garth tells how the learned Dr. Edward Tyson filled his library from
the Duck Lane shops:

'Abandoned authors here a refuge meet,
And from the world to dust and worms retreat
Here dregs and sediments and authors reign,
Refuse of fairs and gleanings of Duck Lane.'

Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt has noted the fact that a copy of Zach. Ursinus'
'Summe of Christian Religion,' translated by H. Parry (1617), contains
on the first leaf this note: 'Mary Rous her Booke, bought in Duck Lane
bey Smithfelde, this year, 1644.'

Not very far from Little Britain is the Barbican, which at the earlier
part of the century contained several bookshops, but has since
degenerated into forbidding warehouses. Charles Lamb, under date March
25, 1829, writes: 'I have just come from town, where I have been to get
my bit of quarterly pension, and have brought home from stalls in
Barbican the old "Pilgrim's Progress," with the prints--Vanity Fair,
etc.--now scarce. Four shillings; cheap. And also one of whom I have oft
heard and had dreams, but never saw in the flesh--that is in
sheepskin--"The Whole Theologic Works of Thomas Aquinas." My arms ached
with lugging it a mile to the stage, but the burden was a pleasure, such
as old Anchises was to the shoulders of AEneas, or the lady to the lover
in the old romance, who, having to carry her to the top of a high
mountain (the price of obtaining her), clambered with her to the top and
fell dead with fatigue.'

[Illustration: _Charles Lamb, after D. Maclise._]

The district to which the name of Moorfields was once applied has no
great historic interest. It remained moorfields until it was first
drained in 1527. In the reign of James I. it was first laid out into
walks, and during the time of Charles II. some portions of it were built
upon. It soon became famous for its musters and pleasant walks, its
laundresses and bleachers, its cudgel-players and popular amusements,
its bookstalls and ballad-sellers. Writing at the beginning of the last
century, that pungent critic of the world in general, Tom Brown,
observes: 'Well, this thing called prosperity makes a man strangely
insolent and forge