equently to the fall of Cromwell, Earl of Essex,
when the composition relative to that incident printed in the
collections appeared, and was followed by the series preserved in the
library of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and reprinted in the
writer's _Fugitive Tracts_, 1875. From the time of Elizabeth onward
the broadside in its varied aspects grew abundant, and served as a
substitute for newspaper notices, so long as the press remained an
insufficient medium. The British Museum and Society of Antiquaries
possess large collections of this kind. Lord Crawford has printed a
catalogue of his _Proclamations_, and in the writer's _Collections_,
1867-92, occur thousands of these ephemerides arranged under what
appeared to be their appropriate heads.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the sheet _format_
lent itself largely and conveniently to teachers, quack doctors,
astrologers, announcing their addresses, qualifications, and terms, no
less than to the official, municipal, or parochial authorities, and to
private persons who desired to give publicity to some current matter
by the exhibition of the placard on a wall or a church door. There was
yet another purpose which the broadside was made to serve:
prospectuses of schemes and reports of companies' or societies'
proceedings. The purely temporary interest of such publications
accounts for their survival in unique examples and even fragments.

There is a general notion that the _Harleian Miscellany_ and the
_Somers Tracts_ represent between them a very large proportion of the
extant pamphlets and broadsheets published during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. But, as a matter of fact, they do nothing of
the sort. Even in or about 1695 William Laycock of the Inner Temple
drew attention to the unsuspected importance of these fugitive
publications in his printed proposal for buying them up by a public
subscription; but even in the National Library, with all its immense
accumulations, and in Hazlitt's _Collections_, many thousands of items
are probably deficient; while the two sets of books above mentioned
contain a very slender percentage of the whole--in fact, mere
representative selections.

There have been men who coupled with a general plan a speciality or
two. For instance, Dyce, who laid a collateral stress on
_Shakespeariana_; Ireland, who made himself strong in Leigh Hunt and
Hazlitt; Crossley, who had a peculiar affection for Defoe; Bliss,