Regent-street, with two bundles of animated wool beneath their arms, were on the look-out, as we find his majesty continually advertising his lost dogs. Later we find him inquiring after “a little brindled greyhound bitch, having her two hinder feet white;” for a “white-haired spaniel, smooth-coated, with large red or yellowish spots,” and for a “black mastiff dog, with cropped ears and cut tail.” And when royalty had done, his Highness Prince Rupert, or Buckingham, or “my Lord Albemarle,” resorted to the London Gazette to make known their canine losses. We think the change in the temper of the age is more clearly marked by these dog advertisements than by anything else. The Puritans did not like sporting animals of any kind, and we much question whether a dog would have followed a fifth-monarchy-man. Hence the total absence of all advertisements bearing upon the “fancy.” Now that the king had returned, the old English love of field-sports spread with fourfold vigour. We chance upon the traces too of a courtly amusement which had been handed down from the middle ages, and was then only lingering amongst us—hawking. Here is an inquiry after a lost lanner:—

As London was the only place in which a newspaper was published during the reign of Charles, and indeed for nearly fifty years afterwards, the hue and cry after lost animals always came to town, as a matter of course. It sounds strange to read these advertisements of a sport the very terms of which are now unintelligible to us. What ages seem to have passed since these birds, in all the glory of scarlet hoods, were carried upon some “faire lady’s” wrist, or poised themselves, with fluttering wing, as the falconer uncovered them to view their quarry! We have skipped a few years, in order to afford one or two more examples of these picturesque advertisements, so different from anything to be seen at the present day:—

The next paper contains an inquiry for a goshawk belonging to Lord William Petre, and two years later a royal bird is inquired after in the London Gazette, as follows:—

This Sir Allan Apsley is the brother of Mrs. Hutchinson, who has given us such a vivid picture, in the memoir of her husband, of the Commonwealth time. The London Gazette, from which we quote, is the only paper still in existence that had its root in those days. It first appeared in Oxford, upon the Court taking up its abode in that city during the time of the Great Plague, and was therefore called the Oxford Gazette. On the return of Charles to London it followed in his train, and became the London Gazette, or Court and official paper, and the latter character it has retained to the present hour. The gazettes of the seventeenth century were widely different from those of our day. They contain foreign news, as well as state papers, royal proclamations, &c., and, stranger still, miscellaneous advertisements are mixed up with those upon the business of the Court. The quack doctors, with an eye, we suppose, to the “quality,” were the first to avail themselves of its pages to make known their nostrums. It will astonish our readers to find what an ancestry some of the quack medicines of the present day have had. “Nervous powders,” specifics for gout, rheumatism, &c., seized upon the columns of the newspapers almost as early as they were published. Here is a specimen which might still serve as a model for such announcements:—