I have taken up sadly too much of your time, sir, I feel assured. I intended but to name the method of making blackberry jam, to assure you of its salubrity, and to request you to recommend its general use:—and I have only now to request that you will not suffer the very imperfect manner in which I, who cannot write for the public eye, have handled the subject to deter you from doing it justice.
I am, Sir,
Yours respectfully,
I. J. T.
P. S. It has just occurred to me to say, why should not grocers, confectioners, fruiterers, and chandlers, speculate in the “new article,” and provide a store of it to meet a probable demand? I should think it might be sold, with a reasonable profit, at sixpence or eightpence a pound.
Drawing of the Lottery in Guildhall, 1751.
Death of the Lottery.
In the spring, and for three weeks after midsummer, 1826, the lottery-office keepers incessantly plied every man, woman, and child in the United Kingdom, and its dependencies, with petitions to make a fortune in “the last lottery that can be drawn.” Men paraded the streets with large printed placards on poles, or pasted on their backs, announcing “All Lotteries End for Ever! 18th of July.” The walls were stuck, and hand-bills were thrust into the hands of street passengers, with the same heart-rending intelligence, and with the solemn assurance that the demand for tickets and shares was immense! Their prices had so risen, were so rising, and would be so far beyond all calculation, that to get shares or tickets at all, they must be instantly purchased! As the time approached, a show was got up to proclaim that the deplorable “Death of the Lottery,” would certainly take place on the appointed day; but on some account or other, the pathetic appeal of the benevolent contractors was disregarded, and the gentlemen about to be “turned off,” were as unheeded, and as unlamented as criminals, who say or sing in their last moments—
“Gentlefolks all
Pity our fall!
Have pity all,
Pity our fall!”
At length the stoney-hearted public were “respectfully” informed that “the lords of the treasury had issued a “reprieve,” and that the “drawing” and “quartering” and so forth was, “postponed from Tuesday, 18th July,” to some dull day in October, “when Lotteries will finish for ever?”