The "post for the packet" was at first used only for the carriage of despatches for the government or for ambassadors, but a similar mode of conveyance soon began to be taken advantage of by merchants and private persons. Difficulty in obtaining posts and horses for the conveyance of private packets, led to the interference of "certain persons called hackney-men, tapsters, hostlers, and others, in hiring out their horses, to the hinderance of publique service, danger to our state, and wrong to our standing and settled postes in their several stages." The government of James I. thought, in its blindness, that it could put a stop to the dangerous practice of transmitting unofficial letters, by rendering it penal for private persons to carry them; that of Charles I., wiser, in this respect, in its generation, settled a scheme for their general conveyance through the medium of "a letter office." But the "post for the packet," with his leathern bag and his twanging horn (the origin, of course, of our mail-coach horn), continued down to a late period, and probably still lingers in some parts of the kingdom. Cowper, it will be remembered, describes him admirably. JOHN BRUCE. * * * * * CURIOSITIES OF ADVERTISING LITERATURE. We are all well acquainted with the ingenious artifices by which modern advertisers thrust their wares upon the attention of newspaper readers. We may, perhaps, have been betrayed into the expression of come rude Saxon expletive, when, in the columns devoted to news and general information, we have in our innocence been tempted with a paragraph that commenced with "a clever saying of the illustrious Voltaire's," and dovetailed into a panegyric of Messrs. Aaron and Son's Reversible Paletots; or we may have applauded the clever logician who so clearly demonstrates, that as Napoleon's bilious affection frequently clouded his judgment in times of greatest need, the events of the present century, and the fate of nations, would have been reversed, had that great man only been persuaded to take two boxes of Snooks's Aperient Pill, price 1s. 1½d., with the Government stamp on a red ground (see Advt.). All these things we know very well; but, of the fugitive literature that does not find a place in the advertising columns of _The Times_, but flashes into Fame only in the pages of some local oracle, or in some obscurer broad-sheet, how often must it remain unappreciated, and doomed to "waste its sweetness on the desert air." That this may not be said of the following burst of advertising eloquence, I trust it may be found worthy a niche in the temple of "N. & Q." In its composition the author was probably inspired by the grand scenery of the Cheviots, in a village near to which his shop was situate. It was one of those "generally-useful" shops where the grocer and draper held equal reign, and anything could be got, from silks and satins to butter and Bath bricks.