destitute of advertisements. The terrible contest of the succeeding reign was the hotbed which forced the press of this country into sudden life and extraordinary vigour. Those who have wandered in the vaults of the British Museum and contemplated the vast collection of political pamphlets and the countless Mercuries which sprang full armed, on either side of the quarrel, from the strong and earnest brains which wrought in that great political trouble, will not hesitate to discover, amidst the hubbub of the Rebellion, the first throes of the press of England as a political power. At such a time, when Marchmort Needham fell foul with his types of Sir John Birkenhead and the court party which he supported, with as heavy a hand and as dauntless a will as Cromwell hurled his Ironsides at the Cavaliers at Naseby, it is not likely that we should find the press the vehicle to make known the goods of tradesmen, or to offer a reward for stolen horses. The shopkeepers themselves, as well as the nobility, were too hard at it, to avail themselves of this new mode of extending their trade: they had to keep guard over the malignants, to cover the five members with the shield of their arms, to overawe Whitehall, to march to the relief of Gloucester,—objects quite sufficient to account for the fact that the train-bands were not advertisers. After the king’s death, however, when the Commonwealth had time to breathe, the people seem to have discovered the use of the press as a means of making known their wants and of giving publicity to their wares. The very first advertisement we have met with, after an active search among the earliest newspapers, relates to a book which is entitled—

This appeared in the January number of the Parliamentary paper Mercurius Politicus. It is evidently a piece of flattery to Cromwell upon his victories in Ireland, and might have been inserted at the instigation of the great Commonwealth leader himself. Booksellers appear to have been the first to take advantage of this new medium of publicity, and for the obvious reason that their goods were calculated for the readers of the public journals, who at that time must have consisted almost exclusively of the higher orders. From this date to the Restoration the quaintest titles of works on the political and religious views, such as were then in the ascendant, are to be found in the Mercurius Politicus: thus, we have “Gospel Marrow;” “A few Sighs from Hell, or the Groans of a Damned Soul;” “Michael opposing the Dragon, or a Fiery Dart struck through the Kingdom of the Serpent.” And in the number for September, 1659, we find an advertisement which seems to bring us face to face with one of the brightest names in the roll of English poets:—

In juxtaposition to these illustrious initials we find another advertisement, which is the representative of a class that prevailed most extensively at this early time—the Hue and Cry after runaway servants and lost or stolen horses and dogs. Every generation is apt to praise, like Orlando, “the antique service of the old world;” but a little excursion into the regions of the past shows us how persistent this cry has been in all ages. Employers who are in the habit of eulogising servants of the “old school,” would be exceedingly astonished to find that two hundred years ago they were a very bad lot indeed, as far as we can judge from the advertisements of rewards for the seizure of delinquents of their class. Here is a full-length portrait of apparently a runaway apprentice, as drawn in the Mercurius Politicus of July 1st, 1658:—

It will be observed that the dashing appearance of this runaway apprentice, habited in his gray suit trimmed with green ribbons, and furbished off so spicily with his cinnamon-coloured cloak, is rather marred by the description of his face as “full of pockholes.” Unless the reader has scanned the long list of villanous portraits exhibited by the Hue and Cry in the old papers of the last portion of the seventeenth and first portion of the eighteenth centuries, he can form but a faint conception of the ravages committed by the small-pox upon the population. Every man seemed more or less to have been speckled with “pockholes,” and the race must have presented one moving mass of pits and scars. Here, for instance, is a companion picture to hang with that of Edward Perry, copied from the Mercurius Politicus of May 31st, 1660:—

Scarcely a week passes without such runaways being advertised, together with a list of the quaint articles of which their booty consisted. At the risk of wearying the reader with these descriptions of the “old-fashioned” sort of servants, we give another advertisement from the Mercurius Politicus of July 1st 1658:—