[33] This Act seems to have been forgotten, or capable of evasion, for a statute of the 7 & 8 Geo. IV., c. 29, s. 59, imposes a penalty on any person who shall advertise, or print, or publish an advertisement of a reward for the return of property stolen or lost, with words purporting that no questions shall be asked, or promising to pawnbrokers or others the return of money which may have been lent upon objects feloniously acquired.
CHAPTER X.
THE EDUCATION COMPLETED.
So far, as has been shown, advertisements have had to struggle against foreign war, internecine disorder, the poverty of the State, and many other drawbacks; but by the commencement of the seventh decade of the eighteenth century, these difficulties have all in turn been surmounted, and the most modern means of obtaining publicity, despite prejudice, and, still worse, taxation, is fixed firmly in the land, and doing much towards the management of its affairs. The country is at peace with the world, so far as Europe is concerned; and even the Canadian campaign is as good as over. Clive has made himself felt and the name of England feared throughout the length and breadth of India, and merchants are beginning to reap the advantages of conquest. George III. has ascended the throne, has been married and crowned, and looks forward to a long and prosperous reign. In fact, everything seems bright and smiling, for never, through many a long year, was the country so free from troubles and anxieties, or with so little to direct her attention from those two great essentials to English existence—profit and pleasure. And so, as marked in the preceding [chapter], advertisements of all kinds progressed as the century became older; and when the ordinary style failed, dodges of all kinds were adopted to give a factitious importance to announcements, no matter whether of quacks, of publishers, or of the infinite variety of other trades and professions which just now began to be bitten by the fast-growing mania. Some of the sly puffs were of a most specious order, and attention is called to one of them by the indignation it evoked in the Monthly Review (vol. xxvii. 1762). The object of the puff paragraph had been an insipid panegyric on Lord Halifax, called “The Minister of State,” which sacrificed on the altar of Halifax the characters of all preceding premiers, from Burleigh to Bute, and the attempt to force its sale evoked the wrath of the Review, which commences as follows:—“As the practice of puffing is now arrived at the utmost height of assurance, it will not be improper for the Reviewers occasionally to mark some of the grosser instances that may occur of this kind.” Thereupon it notices the “lying paragraph,” to which we have already referred, the words within brackets being the comments of the Reviewer:
A noble Peer has absolutely given directions to his Solicitor to commence a Prosecution against the Author of the Poem called, The Minister of State, a Satire, as a most licentious and libellous composition.—The writer, no doubt, merits a severer censure of the Law than any of his brethren, because instead of employing those great talents for poetry and satire for which he is so deservedly celebrated [what does he not deserve for his effrontery?] in the service of Virtue and his Country, he has basely [basely enough!] prostituted them to the unworthy purpose of defaming, lampooning and abusing some of the greatest characters in this Kingdom. [All a puff to excite curiosity.] We think this literary Luminary, of the age [this illiterate farthing candle!] should pay a greater deference to the words of his predecessor Mr Pope:
“Curs’d be the verse, how smooth soe’er it flow,” etc.
[We doubt, however, if any of this honest gentleman’s readers will think his verses worth a curse, whatever they may think he deserves for his impudence.]
This energetic effort on the part of the Review to prevent undue reputations being made by disguised advertisements, had little effect in checking an evil which flourishes unto this day—which will, in fact, flourish as long as a majority exist ready to believe anything they are told, and to be more than usually prompt with their credulity when what they are told is more than usually wrong. The next notification we select is from the British Chronicle of January 4-6, 1762, and is of a literary character also, though, judging by the motto adopted, the work is more likely to produce melancholy than amusement:—
This day are published, Price 1s.,