I yield to none in my love of bookstall urbanity. I have spent as happy moments over the stalls (until the woman looked out) as any literary apprentice boy who ought to be moving onwards. But I confess my weakness in liking to see some of my favourite purchases neatly bound. The books I like to have about me most are Spenser, Chaucer, the minor poems of Milton, the _Arabian Nights_, Theocritus, Ariosto, and such old good-natured speculations as Plutarch's _Morals_. For most of these I like a plain good old binding, never mind how old, provided it wears well; but my _Arabian Nights_ may be bound in as fine and flowery a style as possible, and I should love an engraving to every dozen pages. Book-prints of all sorts, bad and good, take with me as much as when I was a child: and I think some books, such as Prior's _Poems_, ought always to have portraits of the authors. Prior's airy face with his cap on, is like having his company. From early association, no edition of Milton pleases me so much, as that in which there are pictures of the Devil with brute ears, dressed like a Roman General: nor of Bunyan, as the one containing the print of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, with the Devil whispering in Christian's ear, or old Pope by the wayside, and Vanity Fair, With the Pilgrims suffering there. I delight in the recollection of the puzzle I used to have with the frontispiece of the _Tale of a Tub_, of my real horror at the sight of that crawling old man representing Avarice, at the beginning of _Enfield's Speaker_, the _Looking Glass_, or some such book; and even of the careless schoolboy hats, and the prim stomachers and cottage bonnets, of such golden-age antiquities as the _Village School_. The oldest and most worn-out woodcut, representing King Pippin, Goody Two Shoes, or the grim Soldan, sitting with three staring blots for his eyes and mouth, his sceptre in one hand, and his other five fingers raised and spread in admiration at the feats of the Gallant London Prentice, cannot excite in me a feeling of ingratitude.--J. H. LEIGH HUNT. _My Books._ A NEAT RIVULET OF TEXT LADY SNEERWELL. I wonder, Sir Benjamin, you never publish anything. SIR BENJAMIN BACKBITE. To say truth, ma'am, 'tis very vulgar to print; and as my little productions are mostly satires and lampoons on particular people, I find they circulate more by giving copies in confidence to the friends of the parties. However, I have some love elegies, which, when favoured with this lady's smiles, I mean to give to the public. CRABTREE. 'Fore Heaven, ma'am, they'll immortalize you!--you will be handed down to posterity, like Petrarch's Laura, or Waller's Sacharissa. SIR BENJAMIN. Yes, madam, I think you will like them, when you shall see them on a beautiful quarto page, where a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin.--R. B. SHERIDAN. _The School for Scandal._ THE BOOKWORMS