STATE OF ENGLAND IN 1685 .

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No circulating library, no book society then existed even in c j I | ^ p -

the capital: but in the capital those students who could not-

afford to purchase largely had a resource. The shops of thegreat booksellers, near Saint Paul’s Churchyard, werecrowded every day and all day long with readers; and aknown customer was often permitted to carry a volume home.

In the country there was no such accommodation; and everyman was under the necessity of buying whatever he wished toread.*

As to the lady of the manor and her daughters, their Femaleliterary stores generally consisted of a prayer book and a eon.receipt book. But in truth they lost little by living in ruralseclusion. For, even in the highest ranks, and in those si-tuations which afforded the greatest facilities for mental im-provement, the English women of that generation were de-cidedly worse educated than they have been at any other timesince the revival of learning. At an earlier period they hadstudied the masterpieces of ancient genius. In the presentday they seldom bestow mucb attention on the dead lan-guages ; but they are familiar with the tongue of Pascal andMoliere, with the tongue of Dante and Tasso, with the tongueof Goethe and Schiller; nor is there any purer or more grace-ful English than that which accomplished women now speakand write. But, during the latter part of the seventeenthcentury, the culture of the female mind seems to have beenalmost entirely neglected. If a damsel had the least smat-tering of literature she was regarded as a prodigy. Ladieshighly born, highly bred, and naturally quick witted, wereunable to write a line in their mother tongue without solecisms

* Cotton seems, from his Angler, to have found room for his wholelibrary in his hall window; and Cotton was a man of letters. Even whenFranklin first visited London in 1724, circulating libraries w'ere unknownthere. The crowd at the booksellers’ shops in Little Britain is mentionedby Roger North in his life of his brother John.

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