LOST on the 27th July, about Boswell Yard or Drury Lane, a Ladyes picture set in gold, and three Keys, with divers other little things in a perfumed pocket. Whosoever shall give notice of or bring the said picture to Mr Charles Coakine, Goldsmith, near Staples Inne, Holborn, shall have 4 times the value of the gold for his payns. There are also about this time all sorts of quack and nostrum advertisements, an “antimonial cup,” by means of which every kind of disease was to be cured, being apparently very popular. Sir Kenelm Digby, a learned knight, who is said to have feasted his wife with capons fattened upon serpents for the purpose of making her fair, advertises a book in which is shown a method of curing the severest wounds by a sympathetic powder. But even the knight’s efforts pall before the following, which will go far to show the superstitious leaven which still hung about the populace:-- SMALL BAGGS to hang about Children’s necks, which are excellent both for the _prevention and cure_ of the _Rickets_, and to ease Children in breeding of Teeth, are prepared by Mr Edmund Buckworth, and constantly to be had at Mr Philip Clark’s, Keeper of the Library in the Fleet, and nowhere else, at 5 shillings a bagge. We see in the papers of 1665 an increased number of advertisements for lost and stolen animals, mostly those used in connection with sport; but this does not go to prove that more dogs, hawks, &c., were missing, so much as that the advantages of advertising were being discovered throughout the country; and as London was the only place in which at that time a newspaper was published, the cry after stray favourites always came up to town. Strange, indeed, are many of the advertisements about sports long since passed from amongst us, and the very phrases of which have died out of the language. It seems hard to imagine that hawks in all the glory of scarlet hoods were carried upon fair ladies’ wrists, or poised themselves when uncovered to view their prey, so late as the time of Charles II., but that it was so, an advertisement already quoted, as well as the following, shows. It is taken from the _Intelligencer_ of November 6, 1665:-- LOST on the 30 October, 1665, an intermix’d Barbary Tercel Gentle, engraven in Varvels, Richard Windwood, of Ditton Park, in the county of Bucks, Esq. For more particular marks--if the Varvels be taken off--the 4th feather in one of the wings Imped, and the third pounce of the right foot broke. If any one inform Sir William Roberts, Knight and Baronet (near Harrow-on-the-Hill, in the county of Middlesex), or Mr William Philips, at the King’s Head in Paternoster Row, of the Hawk, he shall be sufficiently rewarded.