Although Colburn was throughout his career chiefly successful as a caterer for the libraries, supplying them with novels, which, by some mysterious law, were required to consist of three volumes of about three hundred pages each, the cost of the whole fixed immutably at one guinea and a half, his “Modern Novelists,” containing his best copyright works, in a cheap octavo form, attained the number of nineteen, being published at intervals between 1835 and 1841, and formed a valuable addition to the popular literature of the time. Finally, Colburn, having acquired an ample competence, retired from business, in favour of Messrs. Hurst and Blackett, still, however, retaining his name to some favourite copyrights. He had been twice married, the second time, in 1841, to the daughter of Captain Crosbie, R.N. After a period of well-earned leisure, rendered pleasingly genial by the constant society of his literary friends, Henry Colburn died, on the 16th of August, 1855, at his house in Bryanston Square. The whole of his property was sworn to be under £35,000, and went to his wife and her family. Two years later, the seven copyrights he had reserved were sold by auction, and realised the large sum of £14,000, to which Miss Strickland’s “Lives of the Queens of England” alone contributed £6900. As publisher of three volume novels, Colburn was succeeded by two principal rival houses, with the foundation of each of which he was in some way concerned. As Mr. Bentley’s establishment in New Burlington Street was only a further development of Colburn’s old house, a few words may not be out of place concerning it. In 1837, Mr. Bentley proposed to start a periodical to rival the _New Monthly_, and at the preliminary meeting it was proposed to call it the _Wit’s Miscellany_, but James Smith objected to this as being too pretentious, upon which Mr. Bentley proposed the title of _Bentley’s Miscellany_. “Don’t you think,” interposed Smith, “that that would be going too far the other way?” However, the name was adopted (Mr. Bentley denies the accuracy of this anecdote--but _se non è vero, è ben trovato_). One of the chief contributors to the new _Miscellany_ was Barham, who had been a school chum of Mr. Bentley’s at St. Paul’s, and, until 1843, the “Ingoldsby Legends” delighted the public in the pages of the _Miscellany_. The last poem of the “Legends” was published in Colburn’s _New Monthly_, but by Barham’s express wish, the song he wrote on his death-bed, “As I Lay Athynkynge,” appeared, as fitly closing his career, in _Bentley_. The first editor of _Bentley’s Miscellany_, was no less a man than Charles Dickens, who had previously contributed the “Sketches by Boz” to the _Morning Chronicle_, and who soon, as the author of _Pickwick_, became the most popular writer of the day. Mr. Bentley was one of the first publishers to secure Dickens’s services, and in his magazine “Oliver Twist” appeared. The editorship afterwards passed into the hands of Mr.