To Mr. Bertram Dobell, the well-known bookseller, whose name is so closely associated with Thomson’s and Traherne’s, I was indebted for much information about books and writers of books, given in that cosy shop of his in the Charing Cross Road, which was a place of pleasant recollections for so many literary men. I had especial reason to be grateful to him for directing me to the writings of Herman Melville, whose extraordinary genius, shown in such masterpieces as _Typee_ and _The Whale_, was so unaccountably ignored or undervalued that his name is still often confused with that of Whyte Melville or of Herman Merivale. Melville was a great admirer of James Thomson; this he made plain in several letters addressed to English correspondents, in which he described _The City of Dreadful Night_ as the “modern Book of Job under an original form, duskily looming with the same aboriginal verities,” and wrote of one of the lighter poems that “_Sunday up the River_, contrasting with the _City of Dreadful Night_, is like a Cuban humming-bird, beautiful in fairy tints, flying against the tropic thunderstorm.” Mr. Dobell was a man of very active mind, and he had always in view some further literary projects. One of these, of which he told me not long before his death, was to write a book about his friend, James Thomson; and it is much to be regretted that this could not be accomplished. Another plan--surely one of the strangest ever conceived--was to render or re-write Walt Whitman’s poems in the Omar Khayyám stanza: a proposal which reminded me of the beneficent scheme of Fourier, or another of the early communists, to turn the waters of the ocean into lemonade. It is difficult to speak of _Leaves of Grass_ and the _Rubáiyát_ in the same breath; yet I once heard the Omar Khayyám poem referred to in a still stranger connection by a clergyman who was the “autocrat of the breakfast table” in a hotel where I was staying. Suddenly pausing in his table-talk, he did me the honour of consulting me on a small question of authorship. “I am right, am I not,” he said, “in supposing that the translator of Omar Khayyám was--Emerson?” Mr. Dobell’s experiences in book-lore had been long and varied, and he could tell some excellent stories, one of which especially struck me as showing that he had a rare fund of shrewd sense as well as of professional knowledge. He once missed from his shop a very scarce and valuable book, in circumstances which made it a matter of certainty to him that it had been abstracted by a keen collector who had been talking to him that very day, though no word concerning the book had been spoken. Dobell was greatly troubled, until he hit upon a plan which was at once the simplest and most tactful that could have been imagined. Without any inquiry or explanation, he sent in a bill for the book, as in course of business, and the account was duly paid.