The Cunning Bookseller lived within a hundred miles of the preceding personage, but in pursuit of the main chance, would condescend to do, what his neighbour would have disdained. He would attend in person at the little auctions in the metropolis and its environs, where effects were distrained for rent or taxes, but among which, by chance, some less common books had found their way. In making a bargain with an author, he was dry and cold, and hard and sharp, as flint. He had also another way of getting on. If he saw those who frequented his shop, and whose means he knew to be less abundant, express any earnestness of curiosity about either his own publications, or books newly imported or published, he would, with great apparent civility, encourage them to become purchasers, by observing, that he should not be in a hurry to call for payment. But alas! the poor wights hardly had time to peruse their new acquisitions, before this sharp-faced dealer and chapman would call for a settlement, and either urge the having a bill at short date given him, or would provoke the pride of the poor scholar to part with other books, dear perhaps as the apple of his eye, to cancel the debt and get rid of his importunity. By such modes of conduct, and by extraordinary success in various publications, and in one more particularly, he accumulated very large property, and retired. After his retirement, however, the “_auri sacra fames_” still continued to agitate him, nor had he entirely got the better of this infirmity, when death called upon him finally to settle all his accounts at once. The Black Letter Bookseller was also somewhat of a singular character in his way, and in his day. He was a perfect master of his business, and of that part of it more immediately which related to the earlier productions of the English press. He was, moreover, acute, active, and obliging. It was in his time that old English books, of a particular description both in prose and verse, were, from some cause or other, principally perhaps as they were of use in the illustration of Shakespeare, beginning to assume a new dignity and importance, and to increase in value at the rate of five hundred per cent. Tracts which for a long preceding interval, produced no more than eighteen-pence, now began to sell for more than as many shillings. This rage often extended to the whimsical titles, which it was the fashion of our forefathers to prefix to their publications; and it may perhaps be said truly of most of them, that in this, and this only, their principal value consisted. It must be allowed, that ingenuity must frequently have been put to the full stretch, to have devised such appellations as the following. Hoplocrisma Spongus; or, a Sponge to wipe away the Weapon Salve. 1631. An answer to this was published with the title of the Squeezing of Parson Foster’s Sponge. 1631. Have with you to Saffron Walden.