In further illustration of the state of London at the time now under our review, we will turn to consider some other of its social aspects. Literary society presents some curious and amusing facts. The booksellers before the fire were located, for the most part, in St. Paul's Church-yard. It is stated that not less than £150,000 worth of books were consumed during that conflagration. The calamity proved the ruin of many, and was the occasion of raising very enormously the price of old books. Little Britain, near Duck-lane, became the rendezvous of the trade, which remained there for some years afterwards. "It was," says Roger North, "a plentiful and perpetual emporium of learned authors." The shops were spacious, and the literati of the day gladly resorted thither, where they seldom failed to find agreeable conversation. The booksellers themselves were intelligent persons, with whom, for the sake of their bookish knowledge, the most brilliant wits were pleased to converse. Before 1750, the literary emporium of London was transferred to Paternoster-row. Up to that time the activity in the publishing business was very great, especially in the pamphlet line; perhaps there were more publishers then than even now. Dunton, a famous member of the fraternity, wrote his own life, in which he enumerates a long list of his brethren, with particulars relating to their character and history. The authors of London were computed by Swift to amount in number to some thousands. While a Swift, a Pope, an Addison, a Steele, a Bolingbroke, a Johnson, and other world-known names in that Augustan age of letters, produced works of original genius, the bulk of the writers who supplied the trade were "mere drudges of the pen--manufacturers of literature." A whole herd of these were dealers in ghosts, murders, and other marvels, published in periodical pamphlets, upon every half sheet of which the tax of a halfpenny was laid on in the reign of Queen Anne. "Have you seen the red stamp the papers are marked with?" asks Dean Swift, in a letter to Mr. Dingley--"methinks the stamping is worth a half-penny." These panderers to a vitiated taste, which is far from having disappeared in our own day, and other writers of the humbler class, were so numerous in Grub-street, that the name became the cognomen for the humblest brethren of the book craft. There and elsewhere did they pour forth their lucubrations in lofty attics, which led Johnson to make the pompous remark, "that the professors of literature generally reside in the highest stories. The wisdom of the ancients was well acquainted with the intellectual advantages of an elevated situation; why else were the muses stationed on Olympus or Parnassus, by those who could, with equal right, have raised them bowers in the vale of Tempe, or erected their altars among the flexures of Meander?" The favorite places of resort for poets, wits, and authors, were the coffee-houses,