Among his other cheap books were--“Tegg’s Chronology,” “Philip Quail,” and--perhaps the most successful and useful of all--a diamond edition of “Johnson’s Dictionary,” published when the original edition was selling at five guineas. In 1824 he purchased the copyright of Hone’s “Every-Day Book” and “Table Book;” republished the whole in weekly parts, and cleared a very large profit. “I like you and your book, ingenious Hone! In whose capacious, all-embracing leaves The very marrow of traditions shown, And all that History, much that Fiction weaves.” So sang Charles Lamb; and Southey says of these two delightful works:--“The ‘Every-Day Book’ and ‘Table Book’ will be a fortune a hundred years hence, but they have failed to make Hone’s fortunes.” However, Tegg gave him five hundred pounds to compile the “Year Book,” which proved much less successful than the others. Hone had been a bookseller in the Strand, where he probably acquired his miscellaneous stock of quaint knowledge about old English customs, and all that appertained to a race fast dying out. After the famous trial, in which his “Parodies” were charged as being “blasphemy,” he immediately stopped the sale of them; and, though at that time in urgent need of money, he resolutely refused tempting offers for copies. “The story of my three-days’ trial at Guildhall,” he writes, “may be dug out from the journals of the period; the history of my mind, my heart, my scepticism, and my atheism remain to be written.” It is said that he was first awakened to a better way of thinking, in the following manner:--One day, walking in the country, he saw a little girl standing at a doorway, and stopped to ask her for a drink of milk; and, observing a book in her hand, he inquired what it was. She said it was a Bible; and, in reply to some depreciatory remark of his, added, in her simple wonder--“I thought everybody loved their Bible, sir!”