established bookselling business in Britain to be carried on continuously for not quite two hundred years on the same spot, Ellis's. The business was founded by a John Brinley, who chose this location 'on account of its convenience to the Royal Family and the Quality of England.' The firm still retains this 'convenience,' and no doubt the patronage also, for these things never change in England. A little more than a century ago when this shop bought very expensive books, such as unique Caxtons for three hundred, and Shakespeare folios for a hundred pounds, it was supposed that it must be buying for Napoleon Bonaparte, but it was later discovered that its client was the Duke of Devonshire. I knew the business forty years ago as Ellis and Elvey; now it is Ellis simply; but there has been no Ellis connected with it for more than a generation.

If you go to the top of Bond Street and cross New Oxford Street, you will bump into Bumpus, an old established firm of booksellers, who for years have been handling new books almost exclusively, but who have recently opened an excellent rare-book department in charge of a very competent man whose name I have forgotten - but my check book shows the scars of several encounters with him. And by all means, wander still farther north and call on my friend Francis Edwards, in Marylebone.

literature. No need here to enquire for Samuel Butler, meaning thereby the author of The Way of All Flesh. The only Samuel Butler they have ever heard of wrote Hudibras, whose couplets are always on our lips, perhaps without our knowing who wrote them. From them I secured my copy of Hudibras, with the arms of Charles the Second thereon, whose favorite poet Butler was.

Jimmy Tregaskis has moved his shop from Holborn to Great Russell Street, opposite the British Museum, which he laughingly refers to as his annex. A gentleman first, and a bookseller afterward, I have heard him described. Not as young as he was when I first knew him, forty years ago, he is still going strong and will some day hand over a well-established business to his son Hugh, the most popular boy selling books in England, and justly so. I love him for himself, and for his father's sake and his mother's.

III

Reader, if some day you happen to be in that quarter of London known as Soho, about lunch-time, drop into a well-known restaurant, "The Rendezvous,' in Dean Street; go in and keep on going until in the back room you may espy two men seated at a small table in the corner. You must not speak to them but you may listen - and you

And ladies of rank to perfect their tone
Went out of town to Marylebone!

Mr. Edwards has one of the best general bookshops in London, in which I pleasantly loiter away many hours. Or, go the other way toward St. James's Square, and near by in King Street is Pickering and Chatto, a firm that specializes in Tudor and Stuart

the wife of one of them has permitted her husband to retain a great deal of hair: that would be Mr. Clement Shorter, the editor of the Sphere, a most kindly man and a fine bookman, the possessor of an excellent library at his delightful country place at Great Missenden, where I have spent many happy hours.

The man with him, whose hair is conspicuous by its absence, is Mr.

Thomas James Wise, whose library of first editions, from 1640 say, is unexcelled in the world. This is a tall order, but no one acquainted with it would dispute the statement. These two men have been lunching together once every week for well, how many years old is their business? All that time they have been talking books-nothing but books! For subjects within his range, no man has the knowledge that Mr. Wise has. Alert, shrewd, gifted with a wonderful memory, and with sufficient means to gratify his tastes, he has for fifty years secured the best of whatever has come upon the London market. A stickler for condition, only the best can secure a place upon his shelves. Reader, think of the rarest book (since 1640, mind you) you know, and then go to Mr. Wise's library (if you can), and you will find it: in boards, uncut, if perchance it was published that way, 'with the label'; or perhaps a presentation copy with some especially significant inscription.

When I am in London, you will see three men at that corner table; I shall be listening, and when I assume the rôle of a listener there must be a good reason for it. Into this little coterie, I several times last winter introduced a fourth person, Colonel Ralph Isham, an American officer now living in London, who during the war served in the English army with distinction. Colonel Isham collects Johnson and Goldsmith, which he may, for I have mine; but if he supplants me with my friends he will be in greater danger than he ever was in France. These little verses came to us from him after one of our meetings.

THE TRIUMVIRATE

In Shorter and Newton and Wise

A simple affinity lies

They have mutual books

A cavernous longing they share
To possess all works seasoned and rare
That were pressed out of Johnson
Or Caxton or Tonson

And thus do they banish dull care.

In public with Shorter and Wise It is Newton that causes surprise His dominant suiting

From Mayfair to Tooting Occasions ungracious surmise.

With Shorter and Newton and Wise Confusion is apt to arise

But Newton is Shorter

At least by one quarter And certainly Shorter is Wise.

Not everyone can wear plaids with distinction, and I feel that this slur was prompted by jealousy.

IV

'So this is London,' I remarked to myself one day as I laid aside my Times. 'But is it possible that George, the Fifth of that Ilk, is reigning?" From glancing at what is going on in the theatres one might suppose that Queen Victoria was still upon the throne. Bear with me while I run over the list of attractions. 'When Bunty Pulls the Strings' and 'What Every Woman Knows,' both clever, amusing comedies, but not of yesterday or even the day before. Would you see a bright sparkling operette? "The Merry Widow' is at Daly's, as it has been any time these last three years. And there is, of course, that best of all operas, "The Beggar's Opera,' first produced at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1728. It is really the most up-to-date show in London. Certainly it is the most artistic and enjoyable performance given here in a generation; but I have seen it seven times and am not qualifying for a place in 'The Beggar's Opera Club,' to attain which one must have seen it fifty times. "The Prisoner of Zenda' is playing somewhere, and

"The Importance of Being Earnest' is at the Haymarket; this, the most brilliant comedy of my time, I went to see. It is just too old to be young and too young to be old, still I enjoyed it, but to think that I should live to see Oscar Wilde out-moded, to use a phrase of Max Beerbohm's! 'Our Oscar!' who introduced the comedy of words to our stage after a century's absence. The costumes were of to-day and the women were not up to their parts; the country girl, who, when told by the city belle that 'she had no idea that flowers were so common in the country,' replies that 'flowers are as common in the country as people are in London,' gave these telling lines while people were snickering from the first witticism and, seemingly, no one heard them but myself. I was waiting for them. Once again, one can see 'Sweet Lavender' and 'The Private Secretary.' One has a horrid feeling that "Two Orphans' are lurking just around the corner - and is that 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' that I see in the distance?

Now there is a tragic reason for all this: the war did alike for playwrights, actors, actresses, and audiences. London to-day has no important playwrights other than Shaw and Barrie; these are still with us but their work is done. The fine actors of a generation ago have passed away, and the people who fill the theatres to-day are a new generation of playgoers who know little either of plays or of acting and do not demand the best. "The money has changed hands,' they tell you in London: the people who had it once have it no longer; it is very sad.

"You must see "Our Betters." You won't like it, but it is the best thing in London,' someone told me. Looking in the newspaper, I read: 'It makes the audience gasp.' I went, I did not 'gasp'; I yawned. Somerset Maugham wrote it, and it was played seven or

eight years ago in New York. The story is this: an American girl of some charm and wealth comes to London and marries a man with a title. Her husband never appears; he is the only man in London who is never to be seen in his wife's drawing-room. She is being 'protected' by a rich, vulgar American who allows her ten thousand a year, which, with her own fortune, makes her independent. Her younger sister, also with money, comes to London from New York, or Chicago, or somewhere, followed by a stupid American boy very much in love with her. There are two or three women who talk interminably to two or three Englishmen of the 'silly-ass' type.

for title

Nothing happens but talk, until the last part of the last act, when the young girl having become engaged to a Lord, the usual exchange of money for title discovers that her married sister, being 'protected' by one man, is misbehaving with another. The younger girl tells her sister what she thinks of her, whereupon the elder sister gives the younger a piece of her mind. There is something that approaches acting for seven minutes, and some plain statements of the English people's feeling for us, such as one would never think of uttering at the English-Speaking Union in Trafalgar Square or at a Pilgrim dinner.

'Do you think,' says the married American woman to her sister, the ingénue, 'that without money an American would be tolerated in London society?'

'Do you think your lord would have proposed to you if he had n't seen you in the setting in which I have placed you?'

'Do you think anyone in society would come here if I did n't pay them for coming by giving them what they love and are too poor to buy for themselves: rich food, fine wines, music, flowers, luxury?'