&c., can prove seductive baits, I do not see nor feel: the shameless amount of space they fill in our newspapers, and especially the impertinent way in which they intrude upon us while reading, as interleaved into books and magazines, so entirely disgusts me that I have often declared I would rather go without "tea, coffee, tobacco, or snuff" (this is a phrase, for the two latter I abominate) than deign to patronise those persistent advertisers A, B, C, D, or E.And yet I do know a splendid church at Eastbourne wholly built of pills,--and Professor Holloway's ointment has produced a palatial institute, and another wholesale advertiser tells me he spends L30,000 a year on notices and paragraphs, to gain thereby L50,000,--and so one cannot but acquiesce in Carlyle's cynical dictum, so cruelly alluded to by Dean Stanley in his funeral sermon at Westminster, that there are in our community "26,000,000, mostly fools," otherwise how can folks be weak enough to be forced to pay for "goods," or "bads," merely by dint of reiteration?
There is, however, one form of advertisement which I have found to pay,--and that is not praise, but abuse.

A certain article, written as I was told by Alaric Watts, and stigmatising my readers as idiots, and their author as a bellman, was said to have actually sold off 3000 copies at a run; and Hepworth Dixon's attack in some other paper--I forget the name--was so lucrative to me in its results that I entreated him at Moxon's one day to do it again.
Once I took it into my head to collect and publish a page of adverse criticisms (if I can find a copy it shall be printed here) to excellent sale-effect as regarded my tales.

And I remember hearing at a publisher's, that when a book didn't sell through puffing, their Herald of Fame upstairs was directed to abuse it, and in one case a society novel by a lady of title was prosecuted (by management) for libel, in order to get off the edition.

That publishing-house used to advertise in "five figures"-- that is, upwards of L10,000 a year, and was professionally antagonistic to another, from which it had sprung originally.

The critical organs of the one house always used to run down the publications of the other.