Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/271

235 CHAMBERS, KNIGHT, AND CASSELL. 235 hardly-earned treasures of the student's closet, but were to be fairly placed at the disposal of the many. Talent certainly, if not genius, is only the product of the requirements of the time and place ; and as soon, therefore, as cheap books were in real request, men thoroughly competent and thoroughly earnest came forward to supply the want fighting bravely, with all the strong energy of their wills, to do the work that each had chosen, and yet each as certainly acted upon invisibly, insensibly, and inevitably, by the true, if word-worn, laws of supply and de- mand. The means by which this end was to be attained were many, and the labourers in the new fields of cheap literature numerous ; but in our present chapter, as elsewhere, we have selected the representative men and the typical means. The names of Chambers. Knight, and Cassell (the latter certainly in a less degree) are inextricably woven into the movement, of which at present we have only seen the commence- ment ; and the plan by which the most expensive treasures of literature, the choicest garnerings of our knowledge, were placed at the disposal of the meagrest purse, was almost universally that of distribution into small weekly or monthly parts, at an infinitesimal cost a method that may with justice be styled the people's intellectual savings bank ; and it is to the early history of the people's intellectual savings bank that we now address ourselves.* Robert Chambers was born at Peebles, on the banks Chambers's life of his brother, but has been revised in accordance with that interesting memoir, 152
 * This sketch was written before the publication of Mr. W.