I soon after was confined by a most excruciating disorder, and lost the use of my limbs. That told very well; for I had the case strongly attested, and went about to collect the subscriptions myself! Afterwards, I was a close prisoner in the Marshalsea for a debt benevolently contracted to serve a friend. I was then reduced to--oh no!--then I became a widow with six helpless children. Well, at last, what with bankruptcies, fires, gouts, dropsies, imprisonments, and other valuable calamities, having got together a pretty handsome sum, I determined to quit a business which had always gone rather against my conscience.” But leaving “The Critic,” and the ideas which the specimens just given have promoted, we will fall back upon an advertisement of a truly humorous nature, which is given to the world as long back as 1816. What householder who has improved his dwelling for the benefit of a grasping proprietor will not sympathise with the writer of this?-- WANTED IMMEDIATELY, to enable me to leave the house which I have for these last five years inhabited, in the same plight and condition in which I found it, 500 LIVE RATS, for which I will gladly pay the sum of £5 sterling; and as I cannot leave the farm attached thereto in the same order in which I got it, without at least Five Millions of Docks, Dockens (weeds), I do hereby promise a further sum of £5 for said number of Dockens. Apply ----. Dated, 31 October, 1816. N.B. The Rats must be full grown, and no cripples. In close companionship with the above we find another, which for peculiarity is quite as noticeable. The advertiser has evidently studied humanity without receiving much benefit from his researches, unless the knowledge that he is vastly superior to every one else is a benefit. If the advertisement were not a swindle, of which it seems very suggestive, it is not unreasonable to suppose that failure attended upon it, for no man who believed to such an extent in himself could ever be brought to have faith in another:--