For the buying of books, it is the cheaper shops where I most often prowl.  There is in London a district around Charing Cross Road where almost every shop has books for sale.  There is a continuous rack along the sidewalk, each title beckoning for your attention.  You recall the class of street-readers of whom Charles Lamb wrote—­“poor gentry, who, not having wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open stalls.”  It was on some such street that these folk practiced their innocent larceny.  If one shopkeeper frowned at the diligence with which they read “Clarissa,” they would continue her distressing adventures across the way.  By a lingering progress up the street, “Sir Charles Grandison” might be nibbled down—­by such as had the stomach—­without the outlay of a single penny.  As for Gibbon and the bulbous historians, though a whole perusal would outlast the summer and stretch to the colder months, yet with patience they could be got through.  However, before the end was even a hasty reader whose eye was nimble on the would be blowing on his nails and pulling his tails between him and the November wind.

But the habit of reading at the open stalls was not only with the poor.  You will remember that Mr. Brownlow was addicted.  Really, had not the Artful Dodger stolen his pocket handkerchief as he was thus engaged upon his book, the whole history of Oliver Twist must have been quite different.  And Pepys himself, Samuel Pepys, F.R.S., was guilty.  “To Paul’s Church Yard,” he writes, “and there looked upon the second part of Hudibras, which I buy not, but borrow to read.”  Such parsimony is the curse of authors.  To thumb a volume cheaply around a neighborhood is what keeps them in their garrets.  It is a less offence to steal peanuts from a stand.  Also, it is recorded in the life of Beau Nash that the persons of fashion of his time, to pass a tedious morning “did divert themselves with reading in the booksellers’ shops.”  We may conceive Mr. Fanciful Fopling in the sleepy blink of those early hours before the pleasures of the day have made a start, inquiring between his yawns what latest novels have come down from London, or whether a new part of “Pamela” is offered yet.  If the post be in, he will prop himself against the shelf and—­unless he glaze and nod—­he will read cheaply for an hour.  Or my Lady Betty, having taken the waters in the pump-room and lent her ear to such gossip as is abroad so early, is now handed to her chair and goes round by Gregory’s to read a bit.  She is flounced to the width of the passage.  Indeed, until the fashion shall abate, those more solid authors that are set up in the rear of the shop, must remain during her visits in general neglect.  Though she hold herself against the shelf and tilt her hoops, it would not be possible to pass.  She is absorbed in a book of the softer sort, and she flips its pages against her lap-dog’s nose.