follow the example.

Descend to what shifts they may in order to lower their prices, by
piracy from other booksellers, or clipping and coining of authors--no
purchasers! Still, the hope prevailed for a time among the lovers of
letters, that a great glut having occurred, the world was chewing the
cud of its repletion; that the learned were shut up in the Bodleian,
and the ignorant battening upon the circulating libraries; that hungry
times would come again!

But this fond delusion has vanished. People have not only ceased to
purchase those old-fashioned things called books, but even to read
them! Instead of cutting new works, page by page, people cut them
altogether! To far-sighted philosophers, indeed, this was a state of
things long foreshown. It could not be otherwise. The reading world
was a sedentary world. The literary public was a public lying at
anchor. When France delighted in the twelve-volume novels of
Mademoiselle de Scudéri, it drove in coaches and six, at the rate of
four miles an hour; when England luxuriated in those of Richardson, in
eight, it drove in coaches and four, at the rate of five. A journey
was then esteemed a family calamity; and people abided all the year
round in their cedar parlours, thankful to be diverted by the arrival
of the _Spectator_, or a few pages of the _Pilgrim's Progress_, or a
new sermon. To their unincidental lives, a book was an event.

Those were the days worth writing for! The fate of Richardson's
heroines was made a national affair; and people interceded with him by
letter to "spare Clarissa," as they would not now intercede with her
Majesty to spare a new Effie Deans. The successive volumes of _Pope's
Iliad_ were looked for with what is called "breathless" interest,