[40] Stow.
[41] Stow’s Annals.
[42] Baker’s Chronicle.
[43] Whereas, some give out that they could never receive their Books after they were drawn in the first Lottery, the Author declares, and it will be attested, that of seven hundred Prizes that were drawn there were not six remaining Prizes that suffered with his in the Fire; for the Drawing being on the 10th of May, 1665, the Office did then continue open for the Delivery of the same (though the Contagion much raged) until the latter End of July following; and opened again, to attend the Delivery, in April, 1666, whither Persons repaired daily for their Prizes, and continued open until the Fire.
[44] Examiner, October 22, 1826.
[45] Since the above was written the Betting-House Extension Act of 1874 has become law, and, curiously enough, has caused the cessation of a procedure which was rendered illegal by an Act passed nearly fifty years before, a fact which our detectives with proverbial dulness were unable to discover. This was perhaps because there was nothing to be got by the discovery.
CHAPTER XVII.
MATRIMONIAL ADVERTISEMENTS AND AGENCIES.
It will not be at all out of the way to assume that as long as the world has been populated it has possessed people anxious to get married. Marriage is the correct condition of life; indeed we have the best authority for regarding it as one of the principal reasons of our being, and so there is no need for wonder that many of the best-known customs of the ancients bear upon marital rites and festivities. Marriage comes in due course to the majority, male and female; but there are, naturally, those who have no desire for it, and again those who have to make effort to obtain it. There are various ways of exhibiting one’s wares and attractions, and chief among them comes the object of our attention—advertising. Of late years there seems, in addition to the ordinary courses open to advertisers, to have been special arrangements made on behalf of the unmatched, who are allowed to express their desires and recommendations free, gratis, for nothing, in the columns of certain cheap periodicals—the described being all beauty or virtue, or both, when not possessed of capital. Would-be lovers are not generally deficient in either particular when the circulating medium is thrown into the balance as well. So that by means of the weekly publications referred to, marriage seems a much better commercial arrangement than that mentioned by a modern author, who, speaking of the Babylonians, says that “Herodotus records one of their customs, which, whether in jest or earnest, he declares to be the wisest he ever heard of. This was their wife-auction, by which they managed to find husbands for all their young women. The greatest beauty was put up first, and knocked down to the highest bidder; then the next in the order of comeliness—and so on to the damsel who was equidistant between beauty and plainness, who was given away gratis. Then the least plain was put up, and knocked down to the gallant who would marry her for the smallest consideration,—and so on till even the plainest was got rid of to some cynical worthy who decidedly preferred lucre to looks. By transferring to the scale of the ill-favoured the prices paid for the fair, beauty was made to endow ugliness, and the rich man’s taste was the poor man’s gain.”