There was, about forty years ago, an individual somewhat remarkable in several respects, whose bookstore was in Maiden Lane—William Barlas. He was by birth a Scotchman, and was brought up to the ministry; but from causes which I never learned, he relinquished that vocation in his native land, and assumed that of a bookseller in this city. He was reputed to be a ripe scholar. He dealt almost exclusively in the classics, and for numerous years imported the editions—_in usum Delphini_, for the students in our schools and colleges. Hardly a graduate among us, of the olden time, can have forgotten him—Irving, Verplanck, John Anthon, and Paulding, can doubtless tell much of him. When, on a large scale, was commenced in Philadelphia, reprints of the Latin and Greek writers, poor Mr. Barlas’s functions were nearly annihilated. I mention him here from his relation to the advancement of learning in my juvenile days. His opinion on the various editions was deemed conclusive; and he controlled the judgment as well as the pocket of the purchaser. He was long in epistolary correspondence with "the friend of Cowper," as some call him—old John Newton of London; and I have often wondered that no enterprise has yet brought forward, in a new edition of the writings of Newton, their correspondence. It is not for me to dwell on the contrast, so striking, between the present period and that to which I have just adverted, when even professors of Colleges were controlled in their opinions of books by the dicta of a bookseller. Such was the fact some forty or fifty years ago. What would be the reply of our Professor Anthon, of Columbia College, to a bookseller who assumed such authority? of him whose love and devotion to the philosophy of the classics has led him already in so many works to spread before the cogitative scholars, of both worlds, the deepest researches of antiquarian disquisition and philological lore, evincing that America is not tardy in a just appreciation of the excellencies of those treasures which enriched a Bentley, a Horseley, a Porson, and a Parr.