sweet enough, and all the world will believe you. Advertise long enough, and credit will come.

But there must be some nous in your advertisements; there must be a system, and there must be some wit in your system. It won't suffice now-a-days to stick up on a blank wall a simple placard to say that you have forty thousand best hose just new arrived. Any wooden-headed fellow can do as much as that. That might have served in the olden times that we hear of, twenty years since; but the game to be successful in these days must be played in another sort of fashion. There must be some finish about your advertisements, something new in your style, something that will startle in your manner. If a man can make himself a real master of this art, we may say that he has learnt his trade, whatever that trade may be. Let him know how to advertise, and the rest will follow.

It may be that I shouldn't boast; but yet I do boast that I have made some little progress in this business. If I haven't yet practised the art in all its perfections, nevertheless I flatter myself I have learned how to practise it. Regarding myself as something of a master of this art, and being actuated by purely philanthropic motives in my wish to make known my experience, I now put these memoirs before the public.

It will, of course, be urged against me that I have not been successful in what I have already attempted, and that our house has failed. This is true. I have not been successful. Our house has failed. But with whom has the fault been? Certainly not in my department.

The fact is, and in this my preface I will not keep the truth back from a discerning public, that no firm on earth,—or indeed elsewhere,—could be successful in which our Mr. Jones is one of the partners. There is an overweening vanity about that man which is quite upsetting. I confess I have been unable to stand it. Vanity is always allied to folly, and the relationship is very close in the person of our Mr. Jones. Of Mr. Brown I will never bring myself to say one disrespectful word. He is not now what he was once. From the bottom of my heart I pity his misfortunes. Think what it must be to be papa to a Goneril and a Regan,—without the Cordelia. I have always looked on Mrs. Jones as a regular Goneril; and as for the Regan, why it seems to me that Miss Brown is likely to be Miss Regan to the end of the chapter.

No; of Mr. Brown I will say nothing disrespectful; but he never was the man to be first partner in an advertising firm. That was our mistake. He had old-fashioned views about capital which were very burdensome. 

 Prev. P 6/165 next