[25] John Nicholl, in his “Literary Anecdotes,” vol. iv. p. 71, calls the editor of this paper Benjamin Harris, a well-known publisher of pamphlets in the reign of Charles II., and says that J. Knighton was the editor in 1692. This last name may be a clerical error for Houghton. CHAPTER VI. _DEVELOPMENT OF ADVERTISING._ We have now arrived at a period when the value of advertising was beginning to make itself felt among even the most conservative, and when it at last began to dawn upon the minds so unaccustomed to change or improvement, that a new era in the history of trade was about to commence, even if it had not commenced already. So the newspapers of the latter half of the seventeenth century begin to offer fresh inducements to the reader, no matter whether to the antiquarian or simply curious. And he must be a flippant reader indeed who is not impressed by these files of musty and bygone journals, pervaded by the spirit of a former age, and redolent of the busy doings of men who generations ago were not only dead but forgotten. Few things could be more suggestive of the steady progress of Time, and the quite as steady progress of his congeners, Death and Forgetfulness, than these papers. Novelists and essayists have described in most eloquent words the feelings which are aroused by the perusal of suddenly-discovered and long-forgotten letters; and similar feelings, though of a much more extended description, are evoked by a glance through any volume of these moth-eaten journals. A writer of a few years back, speaking of the advertisements, says, “As we read in the old musty files of newspapers 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 candle-light,’ 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 generalising eye of the historian, however necessary to clothe and fill in the dry bones of his history.” Indeed, turning over these musty volumes of newspapers is for the imaginative mind a pleasure equal to reading the _Tatler_ or _Spectator_, or the plays of the period. By their means Cowper’s idea of seeing life “through the loopholes of retreat” is realised, and characteristic facts and landmarks of progress in the history of