Libraries I Have Known Available to Purchase

Every lover of books, and every professional writer, owes a debt to libraries which he can never ex‐aggerate. Whether they lend, or must be visited, they supply the material for quite half his knowledge. He begins with a few oddments upon his father's shelves—my own early contacts with literature were an imperfect New Testament, three dumpy volumes, dated 1799, of The Spectator, miniature editions of Pope, Burns, and The Arabian Nights Entertainments, and about thirty volumes of the orange‐peel coloured Penny Poets—and proceeds ravenously to wider collections of greater or lesser worth. The quality of these wider collections is all‐important.