Though the custom was rapidly obtaining in town and country, the books lent out to read were generally very similar in title to those in the famous list in the “Rivals,” which caused Sir Anthony Absolute’s condemnation--“A circulating library in a town is an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge; it blossoms throughout the year. And depend on it, that they who are so fond of handling the leaves will long for the fruit at last.” We have still only to go to our little country towns and petty watering-places--few now, fortunately, still beyond the arm of “Smith” or “Mudie”--to see the circulating library in its pristine form. At first the benefits that must inevitably accrue from the movement to the publishers as well as to the public were by no means recognized. Lackington tells us that “when the circulating libraries were first opened the booksellers were most alarmed, but experience has proved that the sale of books, so far from being diminished thereby, has been most greatly increased.” Under the care of Hookham and Eber, these circulating libraries did undoubtedly improve, for the proprietors now began to consider the wants of students as well as the idle pleasure of loungers who thought with Gray that the acmé of human happiness consisted in lying upon a sofa reading the latest licentious novelties of Crébillon _fils_ and his genus. The movement was further accelerated by the foundation of book-clubs, the first of which is said to have sprung out of Burn’s “Bachelor’s Club.” For forty or fifty years these book-clubs did good service in the cause of education and progress, especially under the fostering care of Mr. Charles Knight and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge; but soon an organizing genius arose who was not only to render book-clubs, save those affiliated to his own, unnecessary, but was to develop the full power of co-operation in the circulating library itself. And his advent was favoured by a wonderfully extended system of transport through the agency of the railways. Charles Edward Mudie was born in the year 1818, in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where his father kept a little newspaper shop, at which stationery and other articles were retailed, and where books of the fugitive fiction class could be borrowed at the usual suburban charge of a penny the volume. [Illustration: Charles Edward Mudie, founder of Mudie’s Library.] Mr. Mudie’s education was, as he says, “properly cared for,” and he stayed at home assisting in his father’s business until he was twenty-two years of age; and even in his early days he made it his great ambition to possess a circulating library of his own, declaring that when once he was started he would be second to none.