CURIOSITIES OF CIVILIZATION.

CURIOSITIES OF CIVILIZATION.

REPRINTED FROM THE
“QUARTERLY” & “EDINBURGH” REVIEWS.

BY
ANDREW WYNTER, M.D.

SEVENTH EDITION.

LONDON:
ROBERT HARDWICKE, 192, PICCADILLY,
AND ALL BOOKSELLERS.

[The Right of Translation is reserved.]

TO THE READER.

CONTENTS.

ADVERTISEMENTS.

It is our purpose to draw out, as a thread might be drawn from some woven fabric, a continuous line of advertisements from the newspaper press of this country, since its establishment to the present time; and, by so doing, to show how distinctly, from its dye, the pattern of the age through which it ran is represented. If we follow up to its source any public institution, fashion, or amusement, which has flourished during a long period of time, we can gain some idea of our national progress and development; but it strikes us that in no manner can we so well obtain at a rapid glance a view of the salient points of generations that have passed, as by consulting those small voices that have cried from age to age from the pages of the press, declaring the wants, the losses, the amusements, and the money-making eagerness of the people.

As we read in the old musty files of papers those naïve announcements, the very hum of bygone generations seems to rise to the ear. The chapman exhibits his quaint wares; the mountebank capers again upon his stage; we have the living portrait of the highwayman flying from justice; we see the old china auctions thronged with ladies of quality with their attendant negro boys, or those “by inch of candlelight” forming many a Schalken-like picture of light and shade; or, later still, we have Hogarthian sketches of the young bloods who swelled of old along the Pall-Mall. We trace the moving panorama of men and manners up to our own less demonstrative but more earnest times; and all these cabinet pictures are the very daguerreotypes cast by the age which they exhibit, not done for effect, but faithful reflections of those insignificant items of life and things, too small, it would seem, for the generalizing eye of the historian, however necessary to clothe and fill in the dry bones of his history.

The English Mercurie of 1588, which professes to have been published during those momentous days when the Spanish Armada was hovering and waiting to pounce upon our southern shores, contains, among its items of news, three or four book advertisements, and these would undoubtedly have been the first put forth in England were that newspaper genuine. Mr. Watts, of the British Museum, has, however, proved that the several numbers of this journal to be found in our national library are gross forgeries, and, indeed, the most inexperienced eye in such matters can easily see that neither their type, paper, spelling, nor composition are much more than one, instead of upwards of two centuries and a half old. Newspapers, in the strict sense of the word—that is, publications of news appearing at stated intervals, and regularly paged on—did not make their appearance until the latter end of the reign of James I. The Weekely Newes, published in London in 1622, was the first publication which answered to this description; it contained, however, only a few scraps of foreign intelligence, and was quite