a regular champion among pianoforte-makers, and who makes curious little extracts bracketed opposite the names of papers and celebrities that give him testimonials, throughout a long newspaper column, all about his patent check repeater-action gold medal pianofortes. Sir Julius Benedict, the Examiner, Brinley Richards, the Standard, and Sydney Smith are among many other men and papers quoted. We are not aware who Sydney Smith may be nowadays, but should hardly think the great wit and essayist who died thirty years ago could have known enough about Brinsmead’s pianos to enable him to say “their touch is absolute perfection.”
Notwithstanding all that has been written and said about the value of newspaper notices as distinguished from advertisements, there is no reasonable room for doubt that a representative of the general advertising class would far sooner see his shop paraded in a pantomime, or hear himself referred to by a low comedian, than be recipient of really valuable attention at the hands of a newspaper writer. There are, of course, exceptions, and these reap the reward their rivals despise. The elder Mathews was a victim to the rather illogical rage for that phase of theatrical advertisement to which we have just referred. Amongst the extraordinary effects of his popularity,