One thing, at least, I learned from my London experience:  better a small city where one knows all it has to offer, than a great city where one has no disinterested friend to direct him to the right places to find what he wants.  But of course there are some grand magazines which are known all the world over, and which no one should leave London without entering as a looker-on, if not as a purchaser.

There was one place I determined to visit, and one man I meant to see, before returning.  The place was a certain book-store or book-shop, and the person was its proprietor, Mr. Bernard Quaritch.  I was getting very much pressed for time, and I allowed ten minutes only for my visit.  I never had any dealings with Mr. Quaritch, but one of my near relatives had, and I had often received his catalogues, the scale of prices in which had given me an impression almost of sublimity.  I found Mr. Bernard Quaritch at No. 15 Piccadilly, and introduced myself, not as one whose name he must know, but rather as a stranger, of whom he might have heard through my relative.  The extensive literature of catalogues is probably little known to most of my readers.  I do not pretend to claim a thorough acquaintance with it, but I know the luxury of reading good catalogues, and such are those of Mr. Quaritch.  I should like to deal with him; for if he wants a handsome price for what he sells, he knows its value, and does not offer the refuse of old libraries, but, on the other hand, all that is most precious in them is pretty sure to pass through his hands, sooner or later.

“Now, Mr. Quaritch,” I said, after introducing myself, “I have ten minutes to pass with you.  You must not open a book; if you do I am lost, for I shall have to look at every illuminated capital, from the first leaf to the colophon.”  Mr. Quaritch did not open a single book, but let me look round his establishment, and answered my questions very courteously.  It so happened that while I was there a gentleman came in whom I had previously met,—­my namesake, Mr. Holmes, the Queen’s librarian at Windsor Castle.  My ten minutes passed very rapidly in conversation with these two experts in books, the bibliopole and the bibliothecary.  No place that I visited made me feel more thoroughly that I was in London, the great central mart of all that is most precious in the world.

Leave at home all your guineas, ye who enter here, would be a good motto to put over his door, unless you have them in plenty and can spare them, in which case Take all your guineas with you would be a better one.  For you can here get their equivalent, and more than their equivalent, in the choicest products of the press and the finest work of the illuminator, the illustrator, and the binder.  You will be sorely tempted.  But do not be surprised when you ask the price of the volume you may happen to fancy.  You are not dealing with a bouquiniste of the Quais, in Paris.  You are not foraging in an old