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Health; and to these Gentlemen' he says, 'If any condemn my rashness for troubling your ears with so many unlearned pamphlets, I will straight shroud myself under the shadow of your courtesies.' The scholar was addressing the gentlemen' of the Inns of Court and of the Universities. He was looking to a ruder class of readers when, in 1591, he published A Notable Discovery of Cosenage,' having himself, as he confesses, kept villainous company. This tract he addresses To the young Gentlemen, Merchants, Apprentices, Farmers, and plain Countrymen.' Here is a great extension of the reading public: but we have some doubts if Greene's tract ever reached Farmers and plain Countrymen.' The question arises, how were books to be circulated in the provinces? It was more than a century later before some of the largest towns, such as Birmingham, had their booksellers. The pedlers who kept the fairs and markets were the booksellers of the early days of the press. The last new pamphlet travelled into the country in the same pack with the last new ruff; it travelled many miles, and found few buyers. And yet for some popular books the demand was not contemptible. Sir Thomas Challoner translated The Praise of Folly,' of Erasmus, which was published in 1577; and the Stationers' Company stipulated with the publisher that he should print 'not above 1500 of any impression," and that any of the Company may lay on with him, reasonably, at every impression.' Mr. Collier, who gives this curious extract from the Stationers' Registers,' thinks that this meant sharing the profits.' It meant that whilst the sheets were at press any member of the Company might print off a reasonable number for his own sale. To 'lay on ' is still a technical term in printing. Challoner's Erasmus was an amusing book for the scholar, and had, no doubt, a special sale amongst teachers and students. Philip Stubbes, in his Anatomy of Abuses,' first published in 1583, bitterly complains that pamphlets of toys and babbleries corrupt men's minds and pervert good wits;' and he especially laments that such books, being better

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esteemed and more vendible than the godliest and sagest books that be,' have caused that worthy Book of Martyrs, made by that famous father and excellent instrument in God his Church, Master John Foxe, so little to be accepted." We might have concluded that, even in those days of limited bookselling, the great popular book of the Acts and Monuments' would have had an universal sale, with its wonderful woodcuts and its deep interest for the bulk of the people. But when its excitement was simply historical two centuries afterwards, the same book would be found in many a peasant's cottage, for the sole reason that it might be purchased in small portions by a periodical outlay. Whilst the wares of worthy John Fox were sleeping in the bookseller's warehouse, the people were buying their Almanacs and Prognostications,' which Christopher Barker, speaking of their patentee, calls a pretty co modity towards an honest man's living.' They were buy ing, in this year of 1582, The Dial of Destiny,' an astr logical treatise ; The Examination and Confession of Witches' The Execution of Edmund Campion, the Jesuit; The Interpretation of Dreams;' A Treatise the rare and strange Wonders seen in the Air.' They were buying A Ballad of the Lamentation of a modest Maiden being deceitfully forsaken; A Ballad entitled Now we go, or the Papists' new overthrow;' The picture of two pernicious Varlets, called Prig Pickthat and Clem Clawback;' A Ballad entitled a doleful Ditty declaring the unfortunate hap of two faithful friends, th one went out of her wits and the other for sorrow died They were buying story-books in prose and rhyme. accounts of murders and treasons, of fires and ear quakes, and songs, old and plain.' The Court had it Euphues, very pleasant for all gentlemen to read; a the City its mirror of Court manners, entitled How young gentleman may behave himself in all companies."

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If we look very broadly at the character of the popu literature of the middle period of the reign of Elizabeth and compare it with the popular literature of our ow

day, we shall find that the differences are more in degree than in kind. We have purposely selected the period before the uprising of our great dramatic literature, which must have had a prodigious effect upon the intellectual condition of the people. There was a great deal of training going forward in the grammarschools for the sons of tradesmen, and of the more opulent cultivators; but the rudiments of knowledge were not accessible to the labourers in rural districts, and the inferior handicraftsmen. There was, probably, no great distinction in the acquirements of the gentry and the burgesses. Some read with a real desire for information; ; some for mere amusement. Newspapers were not as yet. In the country-house, where reading was an occupation, there was Hall's Chronicle,' and Stow's Chronicle,' and, may be, his rival, Grafton's; there was Painter's Palace of Pleasure,' Tusser's Five Hundred Points of good Husbandry,' and, though Philip Stubbes denies its popularity, Fox's 'Book of Martyrs.' Chaucer and Gower had become obsolete in the courtly circles; but Surrey, and Sackville, and Gascoigne were dozed over after the noontide dinner. The peers and commoners who came to Court and Parliament bought the new Travels and Discoveries, and carried them into the country, for the solace of many a long winter evening's curiosity about antres vast and deserts idle.' The Greek and Roman classics were becoming somewhat popularly known through translations. But it is tolerably clear that much of the light reading, and most of the cheapest books, were rubbish spun over and over again out of the novels of Bandello, and Boccaccio, and Boisteau, and losing their original elegance in hasty and imperfect translations. The taste for such reading received its best counteraction when the stage became a noble instrument of popular instruction; and when those who did not frequent the theatres had a wondrous store of exciting fiction opened to them by a few plays of Shakspere and many more of his contemporaries. It was in vain that puritanism, such as that of Prynne, denounced the ordi

nary reading of Comedies, Tragedies, Arcadias, Amorous Histories, Poets,' as unlawful. They held their empire till civil war came to put an end to most home-studies, except that of party and polemical pamphlets. But even in the tempestuous times that preceded the great outbreak, Sir Henry Wotton, quoting the saying of a Frenchman, laments that his country was much the worse by old men studying the venom of policy, and young men reading the dregs of fancy.'

SECTION II.

IN a condition of society which may be characterised as that of a very imperfect civilisation-when communication is difficult, and in some cases impossible; when the influ ence of the capital upon the provinces is very partial and uncertain; when knowledge is for the most part confirel to the learned professions-we must regard the rich uppe classes precisely in the same relation to popular literature as we now regard the poor lower classes. We must vie them as essentially uncritical and unrefined, swallowing the coarsest intellectual food with greediness, looking chiefly to excitement and amusement in books, and not very willingly elevating themselves to mental improve ment as a great duty. When Ben Jonson speaks of the prerogative the vulgar have to lose their judgments, at like that which is naught'-when he derides the taste 'the beast the multitude'- he also takes care to tell us tha his description of those who think rude things greater than polished,' not only applied to the sordid multitude, but: the neater sort of our gallants: for all are the multitude; only they differ in clothes, not in judgment or understanding. About the time when Jonson wrote thus-more calmly than when he denounced the loathed stage, and the mor loathsome age'-Burton was exhibiting the intellectua condition of the gentry in his Anatomy of Melancholy:

Discoveries.

I am not ignorant how barbarously and basely for the most part our ruder gentry esteem of libraries and books; how they neglect and contemn so great a treasure, so inestimable a benefit, as Esop's cock did the jewel he found in the dunghill; and all through error, ignorance, and want of education.' Again, he says, 'If they read a book at any time, 'tis an English chronicle, St. Huon of Bordeaux, Amadis de Gaul, &c., a play-book, or some pamphlet of news; and that at such seasons only when they cannot, stir abroad.' The 'pamphlet of news' was a prodigious ingredient in the queer cauldron of popular literature for the next half-century. Every one has heard of the thirty thousand tracts in the British Museum, forming two thousand volumes, all published between 1640 and 1660. The impression of many of these was probably very small; for Rushworth, to whom they became authorities, tells us that King Charles I. gave ten pounds for the liberty to read one at the owner's house in St. Paul's Churchyard. This was the twenty years' work of Milton's 'pens and heads, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas.' Others were, as fast reading, trying all things.' Milton asks, What could a man require more from a nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge?' He truly answers: Wise and faithful labourers, to make a knowing people, a nation of prophets, sages, and worthies.'* The wise and faithful labourers' were scarcely to be found in the civil and ecclesiastical violence of these partisan writers. the pioneers of constitutional liberty; and was built up, literature, properly so called, things great or enduring. The demand for books in that stormy period was, doubtless, very limited. The belief that the Eurov Barilik was written by Charles I. would naturally account for the sale of fifty editions in one year. But from 1623 to 1664 only two editions of Shakspere were sold; and when the Restoration came, an act of

But they were till that fabric would offer few