But this fond delusion has vanished.  People have not only ceased to purchase those old-fashioned things called books, but even to read them!  Instead of cutting new works, page by page, people cut them altogether!  To far-sighted philosophers, indeed, this was a state of things long foreshown.  It could not be otherwise.  The reading world was a sedentary world.  The literary public was a public lying at anchor.  When France delighted in the twelve-volume novels of Mademoiselle de Scuderi, it drove in coaches and six, at the rate of four miles an hour; when England luxuriated in those of Richardson, in eight, it drove in coaches and four, at the rate of five.  A journey was then esteemed a family calamity; and people abided all the year round in their cedar parlours, thankful to be diverted by the arrival of the Spectator, or a few pages of the Pilgrim’s Progress, or a new sermon.  To their unincidental lives, a book was an event.

Those were the days worth writing for!  The fate of Richardson’s heroines was made a national affair; and people interceded with him by letter to “spare Clarissa,” as they would not now intercede with her Majesty to spare a new Effie Deans.  The successive volumes of Pope’s Iliad were looked for with what is called “breathless” interest, while such political sheets as the Drapier’s Letters, or Junius, set the whole kingdom in an uproar!  And now, if Pope, or Swift, or Fielding, or Johnson, or Sterne, were to rise from the grave, MS. in hand, the most adventurous publisher would pass a sleepless night before he undertook the risk of paper and print; would advise a small edition, and exact a sum down in ready money, to be laid out in puffs and advertisements!  “Even then, though we may get rid of a few copies to the circulating libraries,” he would observe, “do not expect, sir, to obtain readers.  A few old maids in the county towns, and a few gouty old gentlemen at the clubs; are the only persons of the present day who ever open a book!”

And who can wonder? Who has leisure to read? Who cares to sit down and spell out accounts of travels which he can make at less cost than the cost of the narrative? Who wants to peruse fictitious adventures, when railroads and steamboats woo him to adventures of his own?  Egypt was once a land of mystery; now, every lad, on leaving Eton, yachts it to the pyramids.  India was once a country to dream of over a book.  Even quartoes, if tolerably well-seasoned with suttees and sandalwood, went down; now, every genteel family has its “own correspondent,” per favour of the Red Sea; and the best printed account of Cabul would fall stillborn from the press.  As to Van Dieman’s Land, it is vulgar as the Isle of Dogs; and since people have steamed it backwards and forwards across the Atlantic more easily than formerly across the Channel, every woman chooses to be her own Trollope—­every man his own Boz!