It is not only what are called the industrial classes whose literary resources have been expanded and transformed during the Victorian age. Libraries for a different class of readers have of late years increased throughout the Kingdom, in the provinces not less than in the capital. Mudie's is, in the most literal sense of the epithet, a national agency. Its headquarters are in London. There is no town or village book club in the country, which is not fed from its metropolitan shelves. Mudie's Library was founded by the late C. E. Mudie, in 1842, two years after the St James's Square London Library. If light literature were alone in demand, this library would not flourish as during more than half a century it has done. Without it, many of the candidates for the Indian, the Home Civil Services and other such examinations would be unable to get up their books. A theologian like Canon Liddon turns new light on old truths. A pious and picturesque impressionist like Dean Arthur Stanley presents the scenes and incidents of sacred story as he has himself seen or imagined them. A Darwin propounds a fresh theory for the origin of life; a Froude rehabilitates a Tudor; a Freeman refutes a Froude; a Livingstone explores a Dark Continent; a Stanley recovers a reluctant Livingstone or an indignant Emin. A Green illustrates the growth of an English people; a Lecky supplements the work of a Buckle or makes the eighteenth century real as the nineteenth. Mudie's is the channel through which these streams of culture are conveyed to the majority of English readers; for, highly educated as the Victorian age may be, it is with books that its economies begin To buy volumes that can be borrowed or hired, is accounted wanton extravagance. A work which requires more study, which holds public attention longer than a novel, must obviously be most profitable to the circulating librarian. Nor would self-interest let him be a distributor of fiction alone or even primarily. The increase of novel readers as of novel writers is indeed the great literary feature of the day. Not less characteristic of the time are the new periodicals which have created a fresh public for themselves. The sixpenny magazines count their circulation by millions, and are borrowed from the library as well as bought by their readers. But it is the standard works, as shown by the instances already specified that give to Mudie's its deserved epithet of 'Select.'