OLD ADVERTISEMENTS 257 



aud. took life, for the most part, like a close of medi- 

 cine, while we are apt to go to the other extreme and 

 take it like champagne. No doubt our great-great- 

 grandfathers would think the most sedate of us not 

 a little wild could they witness how we live to-day, 

 while, in our turn, we look back upon their times, and 

 tliink times and people alike brutal. We wonder 

 what sort of people they were who could, in this 

 England of ours, offer a " Black boy for sale — docile 

 and obedient. Answers to the name of Peter." Yet 

 such advertisements were common on the front page 

 of our newspapers once upon a time. Slavery was 

 then a matter of course, and to have a black page for 

 her very own was my lady's hall-mark of " quality." 

 Sometimes such advertisements were embellished with 

 little figures supposed to represent nigger-boys. 



The race of African negroes has either improved in 

 good looks since then, or else the engravers of that 

 day were not very careful in portraiture. But, indeed, 

 black pages were almost as common as pet dogs, and 

 were advertised in very much the same way, and 

 these blocks were not portraits at all, but just printers' 

 stock illustrations. The printer of a hundred years 

 ago kept a curious little assortment of advertisement 

 blocks. If a ship was about to sail for the colonies, it 

 was advertised for weeks beforehand, and in a corner 

 of the announcement w^as placed something that pur- 

 ported to be an illustration of the vessel. It generally 

 looked like a Spanish galleon strayed from the Armada 

 of two hundred years previously, and passengers would 

 have been quite justified in not booking berths on so 

 antiquated an affair. 



s 



