taught to tell all truths charitably, if smartly,—­and therefore I was glad to welcome his pleasant accredited interviewer, Mr. Becker, a year or two ago at Albury, who compliments me, not quite accurately perhaps, on “good looks and a passion for heart’s-eases.”  Also, the gentleman who represents the Glasgow Mail did his work wisely and kindly:  and Mr. Meltzer of the New York Herald; and I might name some others, not excepting my Sydenham friend, Mr. Leyland, who lately wrote a very pleasant paper about me at Norwood for a Philadelphian journal.

As to Advertising.

A word about advertisements, surely an authorial topic.  The absurdly extravagant profusion in which thousands of pounds are now being continually flung away in advertising, is one which was never approved by me, and as long as my books remained in print, at my suggestion they all got sold without it.  At present there are almost none in the market except Proverbial Philosophy, my Poems, Stephan Langton, and Dramas, and these still live and sell as before, after a silent life of many years.  I suppose advertising must answer, or it would not be persisted in; and certainly the newspapers (that chiefly live thereby) exhort all to crowd their columns, if they wish to win fortune:  but how the perpetual and reiterated obtrusion of such single words as Oopack, or Syndicates, or Beecham’s Pills, or Argosy Braces, or Grateful and Comforting, &c. &c., can prove seductive baits, I do not see nor feel:  the shameless amount of space they fill in our newspapers, and especially the impertinent way in which they intrude upon us while reading, as interleaved into books and magazines, so entirely disgusts me that I have often declared I would rather go without “tea, coffee, tobacco, or snuff” (this is a phrase, for the two latter I abominate) than deign to patronise those persistent advertisers A, B, C, D, or E. And yet I do know a splendid church at Eastbourne wholly built of pills,—­and Professor Holloway’s ointment has produced a palatial institute, and another wholesale advertiser tells me he spends L30,000 a year on notices and paragraphs, to gain thereby L50,000,—­and so one cannot but acquiesce in Carlyle’s cynical dictum, so cruelly alluded to by Dean Stanley in his funeral sermon at Westminster, that there are in our community “26,000,000, mostly fools,” otherwise how can folks be weak enough to be forced to pay for “goods,” or “bads,” merely by dint of reiteration?

There is, however, one form of advertisement which I have found to pay,—­and that is not praise, but abuse.  A certain article, written as I was told by Alaric Watts, and stigmatising my readers as idiots, and their author as a bellman, was said to have actually sold off 3000 copies at a run; and Hepworth Dixon’s attack in some other paper—­I forget the name—­was so lucrative to me in its results that I entreated him at Moxon’s one day to do it again.