Publisher's Synopsis
It is our purpose to draw out, as a thread might be drawn from some woven fabric, a continuous line of advertisements from the newspaper press of this country, since its establishment to the present time; and, by so doing, to show how distinctly, from its dye, the pattern of the age through which it ran is represented. If we follow up to its source any public institution, fashion, or amusement, which has flourished during a long period of time, we can gain some idea of our national progress and development; but it strikes us that in no manner can we so well obtain at a rapid glance a view of the salient points of generations that have passed, as by consulting those small voices that have cried from age to age from the pages of the press, declaring the wants, the losses, the amusements, and the money-making eagerness of the people. As we read in the old musty files of papers those naive announcements, the very hum of bygone generations seems to rise to the ear. The chapman exhibits his quaint wares; the mountebank capers again upon his stage; we have the living portrait of the highwayman flying from justice; we see the old china auctions thronged with ladies of quality with their attendant negro boys, or those "by inch of candlelight" forming many a Schalken-like picture of light and shade; or, later still, we have Hogarthian sketches of the young bloods who swelled of old along the Pall-Mall. We trace the moving panorama of men and manners up to our own less demonstrative but more earnest times; and all these cabinet pictures are the very daguerreotypes cast by the age which they exhibit, not done for effect, but faithful reflections of those insignificant items of life and things, too small, it would seem, for the generalizing eye of the historian, however necessary to clothe and fill in the dry bones of his history."
