lend money and to some extent perform their contracts. The papers at the present time swarm with their advertisements, and the curious reader may inspect them as they appear, as for obvious reasons we must decline making a selection, which might be the reverse of judicious, more especially as the notices do not come strictly within our limits. Now and again temporary offices are started, generally in poor neighbourhoods, for the purpose of bagging the inquiry fees, and with no intention whatever of lending money. Their general ultimatum is, "Security offered insufficient ;" and a good story is told of a gentleman who from motives of curiosity applied for a loan of £5, and gave as guarantors two of the most notoriously wealthy bankers of the City. In due course he received the usual notification, that the security offered was not sufficiently "responsible," and that the accommodation could not therefore be afforded.

This brings us to the end of our list of swindlers and thieves; and if we have succeeded in our endeavour to show that the advertising rogue belongs to no particular class or profession, and that it is idle to assume that any rank or class is answerable for him, we shall be well satisfied. To our mind, and we have studied the subject rather closely, the advertising swindler is a swindler per se, and attaches himself to anything which offers a return, without caring what its title so long as it has claims to attention. It would be a great pity, therefore, to assume that these men have anything to do with the respectable forms of the professions-from sporting to religion-they from time to time adopt, and a great blunder to blame any body of respectable men because a lot of rogues choose to assume their business. As long as there are advertising swindlers, some profession or other must have the discredit of them.

There are, however, still advertisement swindles of a totally different description from any that have been here mentioned or referred to. There is the swindle of the newspaper proprietor who guarantees a circulation which

has no existence, and who, when he takes the money of those who insert notices in his journal, knows that he is committing a deliberate and barefaced robbery. There are in London, at the present time, papers that have absolutely no circulation, in the proper sense of the word, whatever; and of which only a sufficient number of copies is printed to supply those who advertise in them, according to the custom observed in many offices. The readers, therefore, pay a rather heavy premium for the privilege of perusing each other's announcements. It may seem that this state of affairs cannot possibly continue long; but whatever theorists may make of it, we can speak with confidence of more than six papers which to our knowledge have possessed no buyers whatever for more than six years, yet their proprietors get good livings out of them-better, perhaps, than they would if sale and not swindle was the reason of their being-and calculate on continuing this state of things for their time at all events. After them the deluge may come as soon as it likes. We remember quite well an office in which six of these newspapers were printed —that is, supposed to be printed, for with the exception of an alteration of title and a rearrangement of columns, and with, very rarely, the substitution of a new leading article for an old one, these six newspapers were all one and the same to the printers. Now, of course, had there been any chance of one man buying two copies of this instrument of robbery under any two of its distinct names, the swindle would have run some risk of being exposed; but so far as we could discover, there was no desire ever shown to buy even one, the circulation being exclusively among the advertisers. A very small circulation which finds its way in any particular direction may often be far more useful to one who wishes his notice to travel that way than would the largest circulation in the world; but the intensest of optimists could hardly discern any likelihood of benefit in the system just noticed.

Still another kind of advertisement swindle-still more distinct from the general run of swindles-is that by which certain ambitious persons try to obtain a spurious notoriety. Their desire is in no way connected with trade, though as it has in its effect the passing off of inferior wares upon the public as though they were of first-class quality, the word swindle very properly applies to their little trickery. These men pine for recognition in the public prints, and so long as their names are mentioned, no matter how, they regard the task of achieving a cheap immortality as progressing towards completion. Literature and the various phases of art suffer most from these impostors, who very often not only attain notoriety by means of the specious puffery they exercise, but by it obtain money as well. No one can be blind to the manner in which some very small literary lights manage to keep their names continually paraded before the public; and the puffs are so worded that the unthinking are bound to believe that these rushlight writers are the souls of the literature and journalism of the present day. Said the publisher of a magazine, who is not renowned for either taste or education, when it was proposed that a really eminent man should write him an article, "No; I dessay he's very good, but I want men with names.

I can get Montague Smith and Chumley Jones and Montmorency Thomson, all famous, and all glad to write for two pound a sheet-why, I never heard of your man, and yet he wants ten times as much. I never see his name in the papers." This was the publisher who is said to have refused to pay for the refrain of a set of verses except where it first occurred, and demanded that the rest should be measured off and deducted from the price originally agreed upon. So not only in the case of the publisher, but in that of the public do these small potatoes, who have a knack of glossing over their mean surnames with high-sounding prefixes, render themselves representatives of an institution the real leaders in which are often quite unknown out of their own circles,

For every thousand familiar with the name of Shakespeare Green, the writer of "awfuls," there is not one who can tell you who are the editors of the leading daily papers and principal reviews. The anonymity of journalism has its advantages, and very likely the directors of public opinion are content to remain behind its curtain; but it is through this same anonymous arrangement that the smallest of small fry measured on their merits are enabled to parade themselves as they do. There are, we know, many deservedly well and widely known writers for newspapers and serials who are really what they profess to be, and who depend upon nothing so much as merit for success; but even they must admit the truth of what we have said, and must often feel very like the apples did as they went down stream in the fable.

It might be as well here to say a few words about the advertisement swindles that are perpetrated by means of photographs. It has long been a crying evil that at certain. theatres shameless women who wear many diamonds and few clothes are allowed to appear upon the stage and play at acting. Much training enables them now and again to deliver half-a-dozen lines without displaying their ignorance and peculiarity of aspiration too glaringly; but they cannot be depended on to do even this much with certainty. Sometimes they sing in the smallest of small voices, and a few of them have mastered the breakdown and the can-can; but their chief attraction consists, to the audience, in their lavish display of limbs and "neck," and, to the manager, in their requiring but nominal salaries. One would have thought it sufficient that such creatures should exhibit themselves to the people who choose to go and see them; but it is not so, they get themselves photographed in the most extraordinary attitudes, and their counterfeit presentments leer out from the shop windows upon passers-by in much the same manner as in the flesh-sometimes in very much of it-they leer at their friends in the stalls and

boxes. Now and again we see the portrait of one real and justly-celebrated actress surrounded by these demireps, but of late what are known as actresses' portraits consist mainly of those to whom the title is convenient, or of those who combine a little of the actress with a great deal of the courtesan. Those artists whose portraits should grace the photographers' show-cases hardly care to run the risk of being mixed up in the questionable society they see there; and we can vouch for the fact that in a leading thoroughfare, of twenty-five English portraits exhibited in a window as those of actresses, at which we were looking but recently, there were not five that were really what they pretended to be.

Of hoaxes which come within our scope a very noticeable one took place in August 1815. A short time previous to the departure of the French Emperor from our coast on his last journey, to St Helena, a respectably-dressed man caused a quantity of handbills to be distributed through Chester, in which he informed the public that a great number of genteel families had embarked at Plymouth, and would certainly proceed with the British regiment appointed to accompany the ex-Emperor to St Helena: he added further, that the island being dreadfully infested with rats, his Majesty's ministers had determined that it should be forthwith effectually cleared of those noxious animals. To facilitate this important purpose, he had been deputed to purchase as many cats and thriving kittens as could possibly be procured for money, in a short space of time; and therefore he publicly offered in his handbills "sixteen shillings for every athletic full-grown tom-cat, ten shillings for every adult female puss, and half-a-crown for every thriving vigorous kitten that could swill milk, pursue a ball of thread, or fasten its young fangs in a dying mouse." On the evening of the third day after this advertisement had. been distributed, the people of Chester were astonished by an irruption of a multitude of old women, boys, and girls into