ance, to the senses, but it sinks below the surface into the mind.
There are some, indeed, who publish their own disgrace, and make their
names a common by-word and nuisance, notoriety being all that they wa
though you may laugh in his face, it pays expenses. Parolles and his
drum typify many a modern adventurer and court-candidate for unearned
laurels and unblushing honours. Of all puffs, lottery puffs are the most
ingenious and most innocent. A collection of them would make an amusing
_Vade mecum._ They are still various and the same, with that infinite
ruse with which they lull the reader at the outset out of all suspicion.
the insinuating turn in the middle, the home-thrust at the ruling
passion at last, by which your spare cash is conjured clean out of
the pocket in spite of resolution, by the same stale, well-known,
thousandth-time repeated artifice of _All prizes_ and _No blanks_--a
self-evident imposition! Nothing, however, can be a stronger proof of
the power of fascinating the public judgment through the eye alone. I
know a gentleman who amassed a considerable fortune (so as to be able
to keep his carriage) by printing nothing but lottery placards and
handbills of a colossal size. Another friend of mine (of no mean
talents) was applied to (as a snug thing in the way of business) to
write regular lottery puffs for a large house in the city, and on having
a parcel of samples returned on his hands as done in too severe and
terse a style, complained quaintly enough, _'That modest merit never
could succeed!'_ Even Lord Byron, as he tells us, has been accused of
writing lottery-puffs. There are various ways of playing one's-self off
before the public, and keeping one's name alive. The newspapers, the
lamp-posts, the walls of empty houses, the shutters of windows, the
blank covers of magazines and reviews, are open to every one. I have
heard of a man of literary celebrity sitting in his study writing
letters of remonstrance to himself, on the gross defects of a plan
of education he had just published, and which remained unsold on the
bookseller's counter. Another feigned himself dead in order to see what
would be said of him in the newspapers, and to excite a sensation
in this way. A flashy pamphlet has been run to a five-and-thirtieth
edition, and thus ensured the writer a 'deathless date' among political
charlatans, by regularly striking off a new title-page to every fifty
or a hundred copies that were sold. This is