had dignity enough to attract Callades, the Roman artist, to depict upon walls the different actors in their favorite parts. Booksellers, who sold, of course, only to the reading classes, early began placarding their wares. But as from the time of Hero of Alexandria, who described a steam engine as early as 130 B. C., to the seventeenth century, steam was used, when employed at all, for turning spits and organ blowing, the idea of advertising was used in a very little more advanced way.
For after Rome fell and the barbarians spread west, the dark ages came with their physical chivalries, which called it effeminate—or rather clerical—to read or write. Women, now the best answerers of advertisements, were then even less educated than the men. Monks and clergy almost alone could have written or answered advertisements. Indeed, till comparatively very recent times even in England, it was safer for a man named Cox to display two painted roosters over his shop than write the letters C-O-X.
A trader, with the name of Harebottle, considered himself fortunate, as he could write his name with a hare and a bottle, which anyone might read, rather than use letters which would be legible only to the priest, the provost and—no, not always to the mayor.
The unfortunate whose names could not be expressed by an illustrated rebus ransacked the
