Close.
The certain Day of Drawing, the Author promiseth (though but half full) to be the twenty-third of May next. Therefore all Persons that are willing to Adventure, are desired to bring or send in their Monies with their Names, or what other Inscription or Motto they will, by which to know their own, by the ninth of May next, it being Whitson Eve, that the Author may have Time to put up the Lots and Inscriptions into their respective Boxes.
Notwithstanding the positive promise given as to the date of the drawing, there seems, judging by the advertisements first quoted, to have been two alterations in the time. Mr Ogilby assorted his wares in the most tempting manner, and it is interesting to know what were considered the most marketable books, with their relative values, over two hundred years ago. Even then, and long before either became familiar to the bulk of English readers, the Iliad was worth a pound more than the Odyssey. Æsop was rated, entire, at more than the best of the Homeric books, but divided, he was inferior to either, and Virgil complete was worth exactly the same amount as the Iliad. A contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine, about a hundred years back, states that he had seen a then very old but undated “Address to the Learned, or an advantageous lottery for books in quires; wherein each adventurer of a guinea is sure of a prize of two pounds value; and it is but four to one that he has a prize of three, six, eight, twelve, or fifty pounds.” The proposals for this lottery were, one thousand four hundred lots, at a guinea each, to be drawn