N.B. All Masters of Vessels are hereby cautioned against carrying her off; and all Persons found harbouring her, will be prosecuted with the utmost Rigour of the Law. The next is of a considerably later time, being under date 1818, and comes from a different quarter of the globe. It refers to a raffle for women, and was published in a daily paper of Calcutta :— FE EMALES RAFFLED FOR.-Be it known, that Six Fair Pretty Young LADIES, with two sweet and engaging CHILDREN, lately imported from Europe, having roses of health blooming on their cheeks, and joy sparkling in their eyes, possessing amiable tempers and highly accomplished, whom the most indifferent cannot behold without expressions of rapture, are to be raffled for, next door to the British Gallery. Scheme: Twelve Tickets, at 12 rupees each; the highest of the three throws, doubtless, takes the most fascinating, &c. &c. Modern improvements have, after all, somewhat benefited the world. Who would dream nowadays of such a scheme having been publicly advertised in a British dominion less than sixty years since? And this was not by any means the latest of such speculations either, yet it will be news to many that, even at the date given, such transactions were openly conducted. The next, also from Calcutta, is half-adozen years later, and treats of quite another vanity of the owners of the soil : NOTICE.-Mr W. M'Cleish begs to state to his friends and the public that he has received by the most recent arrivals the Prettiest Waistcoat Pieces that were ever seen really it would be worth any gentleman's while even to look at them. It surpasses his weak understanding, how man who is born of a woman and full of trouble, could invent such pretty things. It strikes him forcibly that the patterns and texture must have been undoubtedly invented by some wise philosopher. Ladies, although my shop's small, I pray you won't fear, I turned out my pelisses, the first of the land sure may wear ; If they are not well finished, or the best of trimmings— No. 39, Cossitollah, Jan. 4, 1824. Australia offers us, by means of the Sydney Gazette of August 1825, an advertisement worth perusal : MRS RS BROWN respectfully thanks the community of thieves for relieving her from the fatigues and wearisomeness of keeping a chandler's shop, by taking the following goods off her hands; viz. -35 yards of shirting, 12 do. of muslin, 40 do. of calico, and various articles, as the auctioneer terms it, "too many to mention in an advertisement." But the gentlemen in their despatch of business forgot that they had taken along with them an infant's paraphernalia, two dozen of clouts, so elegantly termed by washerwomen. If the professors of felony do not give a dinner to their pals, and convert them into d'oyleys for finger glasses, Mrs Brown will thank them to return them, as they would not be so unmagnanimous and deficient of honour to keep such bagatelles from a poor mother and four children. This is to apprize the receivers of stolen property, that she will sooner or later have the pleasure of seeing their necks stretched, and that they will receive a tight cravat under the gallows by their beloved friend Jack Ketch. As the old saying is "The better the day the better the deed," the fraternity performed their operations on Sunday night last. 17, Philip Street. Another from the same source, though of somewhat later date, refers to a failing not at all peculiar to the ladies and gentlemen of Sydney, as most owners and collectors of books have doubtless discovered ere now to their cost: IT T is requested that those Ladies and Gentlemen who have, from time to time, borrowed books from Mr. S. Levy, will return them to the undersigned, who respectfully solicits all books now in possession of persons to whom they do not belong, to comply with the above-a fresh supply may be had. Among the number missing are the Pastor's Fire Side, Tales of my Landlord, Kenilworth, Princess Charlotte, Secret Revenge, Smollett's Works, Ivanhoe, Tales of the Times, Paradise Lost-so are the books until found by B. LEVY. No. 72, George Street, Sydney. The solicitation to the books themselves "to comply with the above," is no doubt an Australian figure by which, in order to avoid an obnoxious accusation against the borrowers, the books are supposed to be unwilling to return to the rightful owners. Between forty and fifty years ago it would have been very unpleasant in Australia to imply that any one had a desire to take that which belonged to any one else with a view to its permanent detention. As we have said, the advertisements of more modern times call for no particular mention, and the papers published in New South Wales and Victoria-excellent journals, some of them capitally illustrated, and all equal to anything at home-contain nothing in their columns of a kind different from what has been already given under some one or other of the various chapter heads of this volume. In Canada the contiguity of the States is now and again apparent in the advertisements; but after the full-flavoured samples of the latter, anything from the Dominion would seem poor indeed. CHAPTER XX. D ADVERSARIA. URING the progress of this book towards completion, we have now and again stumbled across something which would not consistently fit under any of the chapter heads in our plan, nor stand well by itself, and though at first rather puzzled what to do with these trifles, they have in the end accumulated sufficiently to form a chapter of varieties which will fitly conclude, and will doubtless prove neither dull nor uninteresting. In advertising there seems to be always something new springing up, and no sooner do we think we have discovered the last ingenious expedient of the man anxious to display his wares, or to tempt others to display theirs, than another and more novel plan for publicity arrests the attention, and makes its predecessor seem old-fashioned, if not obsolete. At the present moment the plan of an energetic Scotchman is the very latest thing in advertisements. Whether it will be considered a novelty six months hence, or whether it will be considered at all, it would be hard indeed to say, so it will perhaps be enough for us to give the plan to our readers, with the remark that after all the idea is not unlike that of the old newsletters to which reference has been made in an earlier portion of this work. The Scotchman's notion is to substitute advertisements for the intelligence contained in the ancient letters, and thereby reap a rich reward. For sixpence he sells. twenty-four sheets of letter-paper, on the outside of each of which is an embossed penny postage-stamp. He fills the two inside pages with sixty advertisements, for which he charges one guinea each, leaving the first page for private correspondence, and the last page, to which the stamp is affixed, for the address. As the stamp will carry an ounce weight, another sheet of plain paper may be enclosed. He guarantees to the advertiser a circulation of five thousand copies. For the advertisements he receives £63, from which he pays five thousand stamps at one penny each—£20, 16s. 8d.less received for copies sold (twenty-four for sixpence), £5, 4s. 2d.; total, £15, 12s. 6d., leaving the difference, £47, 7s. 6d., to cover the cost of paper and printing. It will be remembered by many that the plan of giving advertisement sheets away has been often tried-notably with metropolitan local newspapers, some of which at first thought to clear the whole of their expenses by means of the charge for notices, &c. It is remarkable, however, that these journals invariably did one of two things. They either got a price fixed on themselves, or died. It is hard to make advertisers believe that it is worth while paying for a notice in a paper which is itself not worth paying for, and no arguments as to increased circulation seem to have any effect. Parisian advertisements form an item worthy of attention here. Within the past few years a great change has taken place in the system of advertising as known in the capital of France-in fact, as known in all the chief towns of the empire, kingdom, republic - whichever our readers like best or consider the most correct word. Between twenty five and thirty years ago advertisements were charged at very high rates in the Paris papers, and there were comparatively few of them. The proprietors of journals did not themselves deal with the advertisers, but farmed out their columns at so much a year to advertising establishments or agencies. This was both convenient for the papers and profitable for the agencies. The rates they fixed for advertising in some of the most prominent journals were-Presse, one franc per line for each insertion; Siècle, one franc fifty centimes per line |