Page:All the Year Round - Series 1 - Volume 1.djvu/14

6[April 30, 1859.] which address personal interests, and which require an exercise of personal faith in the individual who reads them. Advertisements which divert an unthinking public, which excite contemptuous astonishment in superficial minds, which set flippant people asking each other, "Who believes in this? Where are the people who can possibly be taken in by it?" and so on, are precisely the Advertisements to which I now allude. To my wise belief in these beneficent public offers of assistance to humanity, I am indebted for the unruffled mental tranquillity in which my life—a model life, as I venture to think it—is now passed. I see my fellow creatures around me the dupes of their own fatal incredulity; worn by cares, which never trouble me; beset by doubts, from which I have escaped for ever—I see this spectacle of general anxiety and general wretchedness; and I find it invariably associated with a sarcastic suspicion, an irreverent disregard of those advertised roads to happiness and prosperity along which I have travelled, in my own personal case, with such undeniable and such astonishing results. My nature has been soft from infancy. My bosom is animated by a perpetual glow of philanthropy. I behold my species suffering, in all directions, through its own disastrous sharpness—and I compassionately come forward, in consequence, to persuade humanity that its business in this world is, not to make itself miserable by fighting with troubles, but to keep itself healthy, wealthy, and wise, by answering Advertisements.

I ask, believe me, very little. Faith and a few postage stamps—I want nothing more to regenerate the civilised world. With these treasures in ourselves; and with (to quote a few widely-known advertisements) "Graphiology," "Ten Pounds weekly realised by either Sex," "Matrimony Made Easy," and "The Future Foretold," all gently illuminating our path through life, we may amble forward along our flowery ways, and never be jolted, never be driven back, never be puzzled about our right road, from the beginning of the journey to the end. Take my own case, as an instance; and hear me while I record the results of personal experience.

I shall abstain, at the outset, from quoting any examples to establish the connexion between advertisements and health; because I may fairly assume, from the notoriously large sale of advertised medicines, that the sick public is well aware of the inestimable benefit to be derived from an implicit confidence in quacks. The means, however, of becoming, not healthy only, but wise and wealthy as well, by dint of believing in advertisements, are far less generally known. To this branch of the subject I may, therefore, address myself, with the encouraging conviction that I am occupying comparatively new ground.

Allow me, to begin by laying down two first principles. No man can feel comfortably wise, until he is on good terms with himself; and no man can, rationally speaking, be on good terms with himself until he knows himself. And how is he to know himself? I may be asked. Quite easily, I answer, by accepting the means of information offered in the following terms, and in all the newspapers, by a benefactress of mankind:

This advertisement is no invention of my own. Excepting the lady's name, it is a true copy of an original, which does really appear in all the newspapers.

Off went my handwriting, and my fourteen uncut stamps, by the next post. Back, in a day or two (for Graphiology takes its time), came that inestimable revelation of my character which will keep me to the last day of my life on the best and highest terms with myself. I incorporate my own notes with the letter, as an unquestionable guarantee of the truth of its assertions, and a pleasing evidence, likewise, of its effect upon my mind on a first reading:

With this brief, gratifying, and neatly-expressed sentence, the estimate of my character ended. It has been as genuinely copied from a genuine original as the specimen which precedes it; and it was accompanied by a pamphlet