text:  So that in the year of grace two thousand and forty-four we shall have the Lady Blarney of Kilburn Square (the Grosvenor Square of that epoch ) enquiring of the Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs of Croydon Place (the Belgium Square)--"My dear soul what _could_ those poor people do to amuse themselves? They had positively _no_ books! After Scott's time till the middle of the nineteenth century not a single novelist; after the death of Byron not a poet! I believe there was an historian of the name of Hallam not much heard of; and the other day at a book-stall I picked up an odd volume of an odd writer named Carlyle