There can be no doubt about the fact that Englishmen as a rule do not attach sufficient importance to book-buying. If the better-class tradesman, or professional man, spends a few pounds at Christmas or on birthday occasions, he feels that he has become a patron of literature. How many men, who are getting L1,000 a year, spend L1 per month on books? The library of the average middle-class person is in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the cruelest possible commentary on his intelligence, and, as a matter of fact, if it contains a couple of volumes worthy of the name of books, their presence is more often than not an accidental one. A few volumes of the _Sunday at Home_, the _Leisure Hour_, _Cassell's Magazine_, or perhaps a few other monthly periodicals, carefully preserved during the twelve months of their issue, and bound up at the end of the year--with such stuff as this is the average Englishman's bookcase filled. Mark Pattison has gone so far as to declare that while the aggregate wealth of the United Kingdom is many times more than it was one hundred and fifty years ago, the circle of book-buyers, of the lovers of literature, is certainly not larger, if it be not absolutely smaller. It may be urged that a person with L1,000 per annum as income usually spends L100 in rent, and that the accommodation which can be got for that amount does not permit of one room being devoted to library purposes. This may be true, but this explanation is not a valid excuse, for a set of shelves, 13 feet by 10 feet 6 inches, placed against a wall will accommodate nearly one thousand octavo volumes--the genius of the world can be pressed into a hundred volumes. An American has advised his readers to 'own all the books you can, use all the books you own, and as many more as you can get.' The advice is good, and it is well to remember that by far the majority of great book-collectors have lived to a ripe old age. The companionship of books is unquestionably one of the greatest antidotes to the ravages of time, and study is better than all medical formulas for the prolongation of life.