'Abandoned authors here a refuge meet, And from the world to dust and worms retreat Here dregs and sediments and authors reign, Refuse of fairs and gleanings of Duck Lane.'
Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt has noted the fact that a copy of Zach. Ursinus' 'Summe of Christian Religion,' translated by H. Parry (1617), contains on the first leaf this note: 'Mary Rous her Booke, bought in Duck Lane bey Smithfelde, this year, 1644.'
Not very far from Little Britain is the Barbican, which at the earlier part of the century contained several bookshops, but has since degenerated into forbidding warehouses. Charles Lamb, under date March 25, 1829, writes: 'I have just come from town, where I have been to get my bit of quarterly pension, and have brought home from stalls in Barbican the old "Pilgrim's Progress," with the prints--Vanity Fair, etc.--now scarce. Four shillings; cheap. And also one of whom I have oft heard and had dreams, but never saw in the flesh--that is in sheepskin--"The Whole Theologic Works of Thomas Aquinas." My arms ached with lugging it a mile to the stage, but the burden was a pleasure, such as old Anchises was to the shoulders of Æneas, or the lady to the lover in the old romance, who, having to carry her to the top of a high mountain (the price of obtaining her), clambered with her to the top and fell dead with fatigue.'
[Illustration: _Charles Lamb, after D. Maclise._]
The district to which the name of Moorfields was once applied has no great historic interest. It remained moorfields until it was first drained in 1527. In the reign of James I. it was first laid out into walks, and during the time of Charles II. some portions of it were built upon. It soon became famous for its musters and pleasant walks, its laundresses and bleachers, its cudgel-players and popular amusements, its bookstalls and ballad-sellers. Writing at the beginning of the last century, that pungent critic of the world in general, Tom Brown, observes: 'Well, this thing called prosperity makes a man strangely insolent and forgetful. How contemptibly a cutler looks at a poor grinder of knives; a physician in his coach at a farrier a-foot; and a well-grown Paul's Churchyard bookseller upon one of the trade that sells second-hand books under the trees in Moorfields!' In Thoresby's 'Diary' we have an entry under the year 1709 of a very rare edition of the New Testament in English, 1536, having been purchased in Moorfields.