agitation was in progress, had four public or semi-public libraries, those at Sion College and Lambeth Palace, and Dr. Williams’s and Archbishop Tenison’s libraries. In a number of large towns, readers of the better class enjoyed the advantages of good reference and lending libraries belonging to the Literary and Scientific Institutions.[2] The library work of the Mechanics’ Institutes has already been described. But the libraries of various kinds that were in existence, most of them subscription libraries or otherwise restricted to a narrow class of users, served only to whet the appetite of the ardent seeker after knowledge, and to provide the apostle of popular culture with an illustration of the possible. [Illustration: _Photo by Langley & Sons._ LAMBETH PALACE LIBRARY.] The campaign which led to the Public Library Acts of 1850 and 1853 opened in 1844, when Richard Cobden presided at a public meeting in Manchester to consider the means of improving popular taste. Joseph Brotherton, the member for Salford, laid the proposals carried at this meeting before the influential William Ewart, member for the Dumfries Burghs, a rich, well-educated, much-travelled person, who was an old parliamentary hand, with a general desire to see his country provided with library facilities at least equal to those which he had found on the Continent. Brotherton, a Liberal of the Manchester school and a strict Nonconformist, had a profound belief in an educated people, and a special confidence in the Lancashire operative; he was returned again and again for Salford, holding the seat continuously 1832-57. These two public men found an energetic and well-informed coadjutor in Edward Edwards, a supernumerary assistant in the British Museum, who had cut a prominent figure in the parliamentary inquiry into the administration of that library, writing pamphlets and appearing as an expert witness before the second Select Committee in 1836, after forcing himself into notice by his severe handling of the evidence laid before the committee of 1835. His wide knowledge of libraries at home and abroad and his thorough acquaintance with the methods of the British Museum, particularly on their defective side, together with the freedom and far-sightedness of his criticisms and suggestions for reform, impressed the committee, and led, rather surprisingly, to his being given his post in the Museum in 1839. Later, his independent attitude led to friction with his chief Panizzi, and he left abruptly in 1850.