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.

Once I took it into my head to collect and publish a page of adverse
criticisms (if I can find a copy it shall be printed here) to excellent
sale-effect as regarded my tales. And I remember hearing at a
publisher's, that when a book didn't sell through puffing, their Herald
of Fame upstairs was directed to abuse it, and in one case a society
novel by a lady of title was prosecuted (by management) for libel, in
order to get off the edition. That publishing-house used to advertise in
"five figures"--that is, upwards of L10,000 a year, and was
professionally antagonistic to ano