But the siquis door was not confined to notices of ecclesiastical matters; it was appropriated generally to the variety of applications that is now to be found in the columns of a newspaper or the books of a registry office. Though no authentic specimens of the siquis remain, we are possessed of several imitations, as the old dramatists delighted in reproducing the inflated language of these documents. Thus, in Holiday’s “Technogamia” (1618), Act i. scene 7, Geographus sets up the following notice:—
If there be any gentleman that, for the accomplishing of his natural endowment, intertaynes a desire of learning the languages; especially the nimble French, maiestik Spanish, courtly Italian, masculine Dutch, happily compounding Greek, mysticall Hebrew, and physicall Arabicke; or that is otherwise transported with the admirable knowledge of forraine policies, complimentall behaviour, naturall dispositions, or whatsoever else belongs to any people or country under heaven; he shall, to his abundant satisfaction, be made happy in his expectation and successe if he please to repair to the signe of the Globe.
Again, Ben Jonson’s “Every Man out of his Humour” introduces Shift, “a threadbare shark,” whose “profession is skeldring and odling, his bank Paul’s.” Speaking of Shift in the opening scene of the third act, which the dramatist has laid in “the middle aisle of Paules,” Cordatus says that Shift is at that moment in Paules “for the advancement of a siquis or two, wherein he hath so varied himselfe, that if any one of them take, he may hull up and doune in the humorous world a little longer.” Shift’s productions deserved to succeed, as they were masterpieces of their kind, and might even now, though the world is so much older, and professes to be so much wiser, be studied with advantage by gentlemen who cultivate the literature of advertisements in the interest of certain firms. Here are some of his compositions, which would certainly shine among the examples of the present day:—