The old town library, adjoining, in what was once the Chantry House belonging to the Guild of Corpus Christi, was founded in 1632, chiefly from books until then belonging to St. Martin’s Church, and remains practically a museum of ancient devotional manuscripts and early printed works. [Illustration: IN THE COURTYARD, THE OLD TOWN HALL.] The modern Town Hall, eminently characteristic of the architecture that came into so extraordinary a vogue in the ’seventies and was completed in 1876, is of course in the style called “Queen Anne,” and largely in red brick. So greatly has the municipal business of Leicester grown that it is already much too small; but it is one of the most tasteful buildings of the kind in the country, and designed more with a view to excellence of detail than of the flamboyant eccentricity that has later prevailed. The design of the Crown Court is especially beautiful, in the restrained way, and even in the detail of the finely imagined decorative iron railings of the gardens in Town Hall Square this rare artistic quality is seen. [Sidenote: _RADICAL LEICESTER_] It will be judged from all the foregoing that Leicester is a large and busy place. It now numbers 215,000 inhabitants, engaged chiefly in the making of boots and shoes and hosiery. With a well-deserved Radical reputation—Leicester ever was Radical, even before it made boots—the Corporation now owns the Water, Gas, Electricity, and Tramways undertakings and makes them all pay a profit in relief of rates. Indeed, they do things on a business footing. In the public libraries of other towns where the betting news in the newspapers is discouraged, it is simply blacked out, but here it is neatly pasted over with local advertisements, and from them the Library garners in a modest income of between £20 and £30. In every way this is very different from what John Evelyn, writing in 1654, calls “the old and ragged Citty of Leicester.” In his time it was “large and pleasantly seated, but despicably built, the chimney-flues like so many smiths’ forges.” But it is within the last decade that Leicester has suddenly rebuilt itself. It had grown enormously, but the ancient central streets were until then obviously ancient. Now they are Twentieth Century streets, in all—in the way of gigantic and highly ornate frontages with show-shops—that the expression indicates.