r with a great
rush of tenderness. This mere girl had made his interests hers in a
wonderful way; she was quick-witted where he was concerned. The
apparition of the insolent publisher, the sudden and complete collapse
of that prince of charlatans, was due to circumstances almost entirely
forgotten, so utterly has the book trade changed during the last
fifteen years.

From 1816 to 1827, when newspaper reading-rooms were only just
beginning to lend new books, the fiscal law pressed more heavily than
ever upon periodical publications, and necessity created the invention
of advertisements. Paragraphs and articles in the newspapers were the
only means of advertisement known in those days; and French newspapers
before the year 1822 were so small, that the largest sheet of those
times was not so large as the smallest daily paper of ours. Dauriat
and Ladvocat, the first publishers to make a stand against the tyranny
of journalists, were also the first to use the placards which caught
the attention of Paris by strange type, striking colors, vignettes,
and (at a later time) by lithograph illustrations, till a placard
became a fairy-tale for the eyes, and not unfrequently a snare for the
purse of the amateur. So much originality indeed was expended on
placards in Paris, that one of that peculiar kind of maniacs, known as
a collector, possesses a complete series.

At first the placard was confined to the shop-windows and stalls upon
the Boulevards in Paris; afterwards it spread all over France, till it
was supplanted to some extent by a return to advertisements in the
newspapers. But the placard, nevertheless, which continues to strike
the eye, after the advertisement and the book which is advertised are
both forgotten, will always be among us; it took a new lease of life
when walls were plastered with posters.

Newspaper advertising, the offspring of heavy stamp duties, a high
rate of postage, and the heavy deposits of caution-money required by
the government as security for good behavior, is within the reach of
all who care to pay for it, and has turned the fourth page of every
journal into a harvest field alike for the speculator and the Inland
Revenue Department. The press restrictions were invented in the time
of M. de Villele, who had a chance, if he had but known it, of
destroying the power of journalism by allowing newspapers to multiply
till no one took any notice of them; but he missed his opportunity,
and a sort of p