Besides holding many valuable copyrights in educational works, and publishing to a large extent upon commission, they, as we have previously shown, are the London agents for all works published by their country clients. Nothing, perhaps, is more curious among modern “literary curiosities” than the sudden and unparalleled popularity of a small pamphlet entitled “Dame Europa’s School,” written in a style and manner not unfamiliar to us in Swift’s inimitable “Tale of a Tub;” witty, certainly, and undeniably apropos to the times, this clever skit was taken by its author, Mr. Pullen, a minor canon of Salisbury Cathedral, through the usual round of the London publishers, and, as usual with pamphlets, they one and all declined even to read the manuscript. Mr. Pullen, in despair, gave it to Mr. Brown, a bookseller of Salisbury, to publish on commission--that is, the author undertook all the risk, and the publisher charged merely a certain percentage on the sales--and limited the amount that was to be spent in advertising to two or three pounds. As Simpkin, Marshall and Company were Mr. Brown’s London agents, the metropolitan sale was entrusted to their care. Without any further trouble or expenditure, the little venture was launched, and in something like a week had created such a _furore_ that the printing had to be transferred to London, and Mr. Pullen is stated to have cleared a handsome sum from the extraordinary sale of his pamphlet, and the commissions gathered by the London and the country publishers were certainly unprecedented in connection with a little venture of this description. The London booksellers to whom it had been offered now began to bestir themselves, and in a few weeks there were no less than seven-and-thirty imitations of “Dame Europa’s School” in the field, more than one of which are said to have been written by very high dignitaries of the Church. All of these have, however, already disappeared from circulation, though it seems probable that the marvellously clever illustrations to the original “Dame Europa’s School,” by Mr. Nast, one of the few really humorous artists that America has produced, will preserve it for a time from the usual fate of ephemeral literature. [Illustration] [Illustration] _CHARLES EDWARD MUDIE_: THE LENDING LIBRARY. Leaving for a while the publishers and vendors of books, we come now to the truest disseminators of literature among those who would otherwise have formed a non-reading, non-thinking, untaught class in the community--a class who, originally at all events, were shut out from the inheritance of the precious garnerings bequeathed by long generations of writers having aught of genius, wit, or industry to leave behind--for they were debarred from all enjoyment of such heritage through their sheer inability to pay the literary legacy duty demanded by the appointed tax-gatherers, the booksellers.