said there was no use in being a printer without plenty of capital, and so that idea was renounced. But to return to Mr. John Childs. About the year 1826, in association with the late Joseph Ogle Robinson, he projected and commenced the publication of a series of books known in the trade as the ‘Imperial Edition of Standard Authors,’ which for many years maintained an extensive sale, and certainly then met an admitted literary want, furnishing the student and critical reader, in a cheap and handsome form, with dictionaries, histories, commentaries, biographies, and miscellaneous literature of acknowledged value and importance, such as Burke’s works, Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall,’ Howe’s works, the writings of Lord Bacon—books which are still in the market, and which, if I may speak from a pretty wide acquaintance with students’ libraries fifty years ago, were in great demand at that time. The disadvantage of such a series is that the books are too big to put in the pocket or to hold in the hand. But I do not know that that is a great disadvantage to a real student who takes up a book to master its contents, and not merely to pass away his time. To study properly a man must be in his study. In that particular apartment he is bound to have a table, and if you place a book on a table to read, it matters little the size of the page, or the number of columns each page contains. Mr. Childs set the fashion of reprinting standard authors on a good-sized page, with a couple of columns on each page. That fashion was followed by Mr. W. Smith—a Fleet Street publisher, than whom a better man never lived—and by Messrs. Chambers; but now it seems quite to have passed away. On the failure of Mr. Robinson, Mr. Childs’ valuable reprints were placed in the hands of Westley and Davis, and subsequently with Ball, Arnold, and Co.; and latterly, I think, the late Mr. H. G. Bohn reissued them at intervals. As to his part publications, when Mr. Childs had given up pushing them, he disposed of them all to Mr. Virtue, of Ivy Lane, Paternoster Row, who then secured almost a monopoly of the part-number trade, and thus made a large fortune. ‘I love books that come out in numbers,’ says Lord Montford in ‘Endymion,’ ‘as there is a little suspense, and you cannot deprive yourself of all interest by glancing at the last part of the last volume.’ And so I suppose in the same way there will always be a part-number trade, though the reapers in the field are many, and the harvest is not what it was.