onths, unless it be literally crammed down the public throat
by the instrumentality of the press and the boarding; and it is
therefore a question, whether it is cheaper to wait for a business to
grow up, like a young plant, or to force it into sudden expansion by
artificial means. When a business is manageable by one or two hands,
the former expedient is the better one, and as such is generally
followed, after a little preliminary advertising, to apprise the
neighbourhood of its whereabouts. But when the proprietor has an army
of assistants to maintain and to salarise, the case is altogether
different: the expense of waiting, perhaps for a couple of years,
would swallow up a large capital. On this account, he finds it more
politic to arrest the general attention by a grand stir in all
quarters, and some obtrusive demonstration palpable to all eyes, which
shall blazon his name and pretensions through every street and lane of
mighty London. Sometimes it is a regiment of foot, with placarded
banners; sometimes one of cavalry, with bill-plastered vehicles and
bands of music; sometimes it is a phalanx of bottled humanity,
crawling about in labelled triangular phials of wood, corked with
woful faces; and sometimes it is all these together, and a great deal
more besides. By this means, he conquers reputation, as a despot
sometimes carries a throne, by a _coup d'etat_, and becomes a
celebrity at once to the million, among whom his name is infinitely
better known than those of the greatest benefactors of mankind. All
this might be tolerable enough if it ended here; but, unhappily, it
does not. Experiment has shewn that, just as gudgeons will bite at
anything when the mud is stirred up at the bottom of their holes, so
the ingenuous public will lay out their money with anybody who makes a
prodigious noise and clatter about the bargains he has to give. The
result of this discovery is, the wholesale daily publication of lies
of most enormous calibre, and their circulation, by means which we
shall briefly notice, in localities where they are likely to prove
most productive.

The advertisement in the daily or weekly papers, the placard on the
walls or boardings, the perambulating vans and banner-men, and the
doomed hosts of bottle-imps and extinguishers, however successful each
may be in attracting the gaze and securing the patronage of the
multitude, fail, for the most part, of enlisting the confidence of a
certain order of customer