It is some comfort to feel, that _by sight_ they cannot be known--that
few of them will survive to disgrace us--that the circulating libraries
possess the one merit of wear and tear for the destruction of their
filthy generation, like Saturn of old; for it would grieve us to think
of even the trunks of the two thousandth century being lined with what
lines the brains of our contemporaries. So that in the year of grace two
thousand and forty-four, we shall have the Lady Blarney of Kilburn
Square (the Grosvenor Square of that epoch,) enquiring of the Miss
Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs of Croydon Place (the Belgium
Square)--"My dear soul, what _could_ those poor people do to amuse
themselves? They had positively _no_ books! After Scott's time till the
middle of the nineteenth century not a single novelist; after the death
of Byron, not a poet! I believe there was an historian of the name of
Hallam, not much heard of; and the other day, at a book-stall, I picked
up an odd volume of an odd writer named Carlyle. But it is really
curious to consider how utterly the belles-lettres were in abeyance."

To which, of course, Miss C. W. A. S.--(even Dr Panurge could not get
through the whole name again!)--"My dear love! they had Blackwood's
Magazine, which, like the Koran after the burning of the Alexandrian
library, supplied the place of ten millions of volumes!"

But, alas! some Burchell may be sitting by, to exclaim "FUDGE!"
Some groper into archives will bring forth one of those
never-to-be-sufficiently-abominated catalogues of Bond and other
streets, showing that, on a moderate calculation, twenty books were
published per diem, which, at the end of three months, possessed the
value of so many bushels of oyster-shells!

And then, pray, what will you have to say for yourselves, O public! from
your tombs in Westminster Abbey or your catacombs at Kensal Green? Which
among you will dare come forward, with blue lights in his hand and
accompanied by a trombone, like the ghost of Ninus in Semiramide, and
say--"We warned these people to write for immortality. We told them it
was their duty to stick in a few oaks for posterity, as well as their
Canada poplars and Scotch firs. It was not our fault that they chose to
grow nothing but underwood. It was the fault of the circulating
libraries, which, instead of allowing the milk of human genius to set
for cream, diluted it with _malice prepense_, and drenched us with milk
and water eve