To offer new books for sale in London at the strangely high prices fixed for the benefit of the circulating libraries would be out of the question; but at the Librairie Nouvelle all the latest works produced in Paris may be seen, partially read, and finally, if such be the desire of the reader, purchased. Many a Parisian, however, or visitor to Paris, whether from love of literature or merely to pass the time, strolls into the Librairie Nouvelle and looks through book after book without buying a single volume. Some day such an institution as this will possibly exist in London; not, however, until the prices of our new books are considerably lowered. But although the frequenters of the Librairie Nouvelle are not called upon, or even expected, to make purchases, only a small fraction of them leave the establishment without doing so; and it is as astonishing as it is interesting to see with what rapidity copies of a new novel of genuine popularity will sometimes go off. No trade has made such progress in France since the Great Revolution as that of bookselling. This result is due alike to the increase in the number of readers through cheap, gratuitous, and obligatory education, and to the liberty of the Press enjoyed by the French, with some interruptions (as under the First Empire and a few years of the Restoration), for an entire century. "How I should like to have Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot writing for me in one of my garrets," a French bookseller is represented as saying in Mercier's "Tableau de Paris," published only a few years before the Revolution. "I would feed them well, but, by Heaven, I would make them work! Why is one of them too rich, and the others too independent to write at so much per sheet?" It is noticeable that not one of these three authors whose works sold so largely was able to publish in France everything he wrote. Even the volume in which the above story is told was published in London. Many of Voltaire's works were brought out in London or Amsterdam. More than one of Rousseau's books were prohibited in France; and the publication of the "Encyclopédie," to which Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot all contributed, was not only prohibited, but cast materially into the Bastille, where the volumes were found on the destruction of the building; which gave the despotic, but in regard to literature, liberal-minded Catherine II. an opportunity of offering to continue the publication of the work in Russia. [Illustration: PARIS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.]