[Page 304.] The Illustrious Defunct.
New Monthly Magazine, January, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.
The footnote with which the article properly begins refers to the last effort, then in preparation, which was made to add to the life of the State Lottery. Actually, the last State Lottery in England was held on October 18, 1826.
[Page 305,] line 4. Devout Chancellors of the Exchequer. The lottery produced between £250,000 and £300,000 per annum. Its death was decreed by a Parliamentary Committee which had inquired into its merits and demerits as a means of replenishing the national coffers.
[Page 305,] line 9. Sorrowing contractors. It was customary to apportion the sale of lottery tickets among speculators, who sold them again, if possible at a profit. The most prominent of these at the last was T. Bish (see below).
[Page 305,] line 28. The Blue-coat Boy. It was the habit, which began about 1694, for a dozen boys from Christ's Hospital to be requisitioned by the lottery controllers, from whom two were selected to draw the tickets from the wheels in Coopers' Hall. An old print, given in the Rev. E. H. Pearce's Annals of Christ's Hospital, 1901, shows them at their work.
[Page 309,] line 3. The art and mystery of puffing. An interesting collection of lottery puffs will be found in Hone's Every-Day Book, Vol. II., November 15. The arch-professor of puffery in the lottery's later days was T. Bish, of Cornhill and Charing Cross, whose blandishments to the public were often presented in ingenious verse. We know from one of Mary Lamb's letters that Lamb (in addition to speculating in lottery tickets) had himself written lottery puffs twenty years earlier than this essay; but I have not been able confidently to trace any to his hand.
[Page 310.] Unitarian Protests.