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Our modern heroes and heroines are quite too self-conscious; amid all their deeds of derring-do they have their eye on Mudie's. The old way was better. Even before the Pyramids were reared, when books were pictures and letters were cuneiform, heroes had their poets and kings their laureates.
"I was once curious enough to examine them, but the result was very disappointing." "And yet they look so delightfully mysterious," I said. "This one, for instance?" "That is an old history of London, with curious plates and maps; rather interesting if one has nothing more amusing to read. But the perennial supply of novels from Mudie's spoils one for that kind of book."
Bonnets come down from Madame Louise, boxes of novels from Mudie's; 'Le Follet' is read in the original, and many a Parisian romance as well. Visitors are continually coming and going the carriage is perpetually backwards and forwards to the distant railway station. Friends come to the shooting, the hunting, the fishing; there is never any lack of society.
For one thing, I took a subscription at Mudie's, and began to read once more. You can't think how it pleased me to get my books new books where rich people do. I changed a volume about every other day I had so many hours I didn't know what to do with. Patty was the only friend I had made, so I took her about with me whenever she could get away in the evening."
Jerry Garnet, the Man, might become a depressed, hopeless wreck, with the iron planted immovably in his soul; but Jeremy Garnet, the Author, should turn out such a novel of gloom, that strong critics would weep, and the public jostle for copies till Mudie's doorway became a shambles. Thus might I some day feel that all this anguish was really a blessing effectively disguised. But I doubted it.
To-day I've got to go to Mudie's to change a book, then I've to get a scarf-pin mended for Crow, and buy a pair of flannel drawers for Wallop, and go and offer two shillings for a five-shilling mariner's compass at the stores for Doubleday. I shall have to get my grub when I can to-day, I expect."
Cecil's feelings may be better guessed than described when the return of Mudie's box was hastened that he might have Motley's Dutch Republic. She thought this studiousness mere affectation; but it was indisputable that Terry's soul was in books, and that he never was so happy as when turned loose into the library, dipping here and there, or with an elbow planted on either side of a folio.
Looking back, I think that Mrs. Strickland was the most harmless of all the lion-hunters that pursue their quarry from the rarefied heights of Hampstead to the nethermost studios of Cheyne Walk. She had led a very quiet youth in the country, and the books that came down from Mudie's Library brought with them not only their own romance, but the romance of London.
The moment you attempt to answer this question, you are confronted by the fact that the Social Problem has scarcely been studied at all scientifically. Go to Mudie's and ask for all the books that have been written on the subject, and you will be surprised to find how few there are.
Each month there came, via Jamaica, the three weeks' old copy of The Weekly Times; he subscribed to Mudie's Colonial Library; and from the States he had imported an American lawn-mower, the mechanism of which no one as yet understood.
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