f being unauthentic, yet on
that account may have none the less suggested the idea to some one.

Abroad the _trumpet_ or the _cry_ appear among the commercial states
of the Middle Ages to have been the usual forms. In the particulars of
a sale of galleys by auction at Venice in 1332,[6] the property was
cried beforehand on behalf of the Government, and the buyer, till he
paid the price reached, furnished a surety. This process was known as
the _incanto_; and it is curious enough that in the sale-catalogue of
Francis Hawes, Esq., a South Sea Company director, in 1722, the goods
are said to be on sale _by cant_ or auction. But the modern Italian
still speaks of an auction as an _asta_ (the Roman _hasta_). Some of
these types are illustrated by Lacroix in his _Moeurs et Usages_. In
France they anciently had the bell and the crier (the Roman _praeco_).

In London, firms of commercial brokers long continued to hold their
sales of goods by inch of candle; but the Roman practice seems to have
survived down to comparatively modern days in Spain and Portugal, if
not in France and Italy. In 1554, Junius Rabirius, a French jurist,
published at Paris, with a metrical inscription to Henry II. of
France, a Latin treatise on the origin of _Hastae and Auctions_, in
which he enters at some length into the system pursued by the
ancients, and still retained in the sixteenth century by the Latin
communities of Europe. This is probably the earliest monograph which
we possess on the present branch of the subject. It is a tolerably
dull and uninforming one.

Some of us are aware by practical experience how deplorably tedious a
normal modern auction under the hammer is, although it extends only at
the utmost from one to five or six in the afternoon. But, like some of
the Continental sales of to-day, the old-fashioned affair spread, with
a break for refreshment, over twice the space of time, and was
conducted, previous to the introduction of the hammer, by _inch of
candle_. This system was somewhat less inconvenient than it at first
sight strikes us as being, since the property was lotted to a much
larger extent in parcels and bundles, and the biddings were apt to be
comparatively fewer. Another way of saying that the early auction
appealed less to private than to professional buyers, and not merely
in that, but in every aspect. The same remark still applies to the
dispersion of all miscellaneous collections of secondary importance,
unless a