safe and honourable peace could be obtained.” For this purpose money was of course required; and if they never did good any other way, or at any other time, quacks and impostors, libertines and drunkards, did it now, as they mainly contributed all that was gathered for some years by means of the advertisement tax. There seems to have been a good deal of drunkenness going on in the time of Queen Anne, and the tavern keepers contributed in many ways to swell the revenue. But even their advertisements drop off after the imposition of the tax, as do those of promoters of nostrums and lotteries, and the managers of theatres. These public benefactors are, however, not so blind to their own interests, but that they soon return.
Notwithstanding the many important events of the next few years, nothing worthy of chronicling in the way of advertisements is to be found till 1720, when we come upon the following, which is peculiar as being one of the earliest specimens of the ventilation of private quarrels by means of advertisements. It occurs in the Daily Post of January 16th:—
WHEREAS an advertisement was lately put in Heathcote’s Halfpenny Post, by way of challenge for me to meet a person (whose name to me is unknown) at Old Man’s Coffeehouse near Charing Cross, the 28 instant in order to hear that said person make out his assertions in that Dialogue we had in Palace Yard, the 11th of November 1718, This will let that person know that as he would not then tell me his name, nor put it to his advertisement, I conclude he is ashamed to have it in print. When he sends me his name in writing, that I may know who to ask for, I shall be willing to meet him at any convenient time and place, either by ourselves or with two friends on each side, till then I shall have neither list nor leisure to obey his nameless summons. Robert Curtis.
Southwark, Jan. 13th, 1719-20.