irectory, an Almanac, old or new, is to be had, the
analysis may be conducted on a greatly widened basis. The rotations of
the changes of the seasons may at the same time suggest many appropriate
reflections on the progress of man from the cradle to the grave, and all
that he meets with between the alpha and omega; and if the prisoner is
a man of genius, the announcements of eclipses and other solar phenomena
will suggest trains of thought which he can carry up to any height of
sublimity. A person in the circumstances supposed, after he has
exhausted the Directory and the Almanac, may perhaps be led to read (if
he can get) Zimmerman On Solitude, Hervey's Meditations, Watts on the
Improvement of the Mind, or Hannah More's Sacred Dramas. Who knows what
he may be reduced to? I remember the great Irish liberator telling how,
when once detained in an inn in Switzerland, he could find no book to
beguile the time with but the Lettres Provinciales of Pascal. I have no
doubt that the coerced perusal of them to which he had to submit did him
a deal of good.

Let us imagine that nothing better is to be found than the advertising
sheet of an old newspaper--never mind. Let the unfortunate man fall to
and read the advertisements courageously, and make the best of them. An
advertisement is itself a fact, though it may sometimes be the vehicle
of a falsehood; and, as some one has remarked, he who has a fact in hand
is like a turner with a piece of wood in his lathe, which he can
manipulate to his liking, tooling it in any way, as a plain cylinder or
a richly ornamented toy. There have been fortunate instances of people
driven to read them finding good jokes and other enjoyable things in
advertisements--such things as make one almost regret that so little
attention has been paid to this department of literature.[50] Besides
the spontaneous undesigned attractions to be found in it, there have
been men of distinguished parts whose powers have found development in
the advertisement line. George Robins, a hero in his day, is surely not
yet quite forgotten; and though he were, doubtless his works will be
restored to notice by future philosophers who will perhaps find in them
the true spirit of the nineteenth century. Advertisements, more prosaic
than his, however, bring us into the very heart of life and business,
and contain a world of interest. Suppose that the dirty broadside you
pick up in the dingy inn's soiled room contains the annual a