text:  The favourite author of the circulating libraries has a great deal to envy in the treadmill! In the days when there existed a reading in place of a skimming public--in the days when circulating libraries were not--the writer who followed his own devices in the choice of the subject plot title treatment and extent of his book and made his labour a labour of love had some chance of being cherished as the favourite of the fireside; installed on the shelf and taken down like Goldsmith or Defoe or Bunyan for an hour's gossip; cried over by the young girl of the family diverting the holiday of the schoolboy and exercising the eyesight of the good old grandmother