The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-04-30 00:00:00

cemented by the dread of some nameless discovery of crime
or folly, which is wielded by the one, the more hardened
and shameless, to wring from his shrinking fellow the price
of silence. With a blanched cheek and an agitated frame,
in the bosom of an unsuspecting family, or in his place of
business, in the presence of a partner who confides in his
integrity, or of dependents who reverence his virtues, the
victim receives the notice of the fresh exactions of his
tormentor: we see the struggle of his spirit, as he hesi-
tates between submission to what may be ultimate ruin,
and a resolve to dare all the world's censure in an effort
to shake off the incubus which presses him to the earth :
end—oh, weak and cowardly human nature !—too often do
we see the keeping of the guilty secret bought at the price
of present suffering and ultimate ruin. Not a seldom-re-
curring chapter in the blotted hidtnry of human life is
this! Not singular in his fate is he who has thus to "
Se-
tisCy" the witness or the partner of his frailty or his un-
suspected guilt.
Another announcement, in the same column of the
same publication, is more explicit than the above :

" THE FOLLY of an HOUR" will not only be your
-11- ruin, but the ruin and the death of many other
people, if you persevere in your present conduct. If you
are a man face your difficulties, and you shall be helped
through them. If you have the feelings of a man at any
event write.—Address to your brother, Gray's-inn.

The too common history of a ruined man is before us
here in all its details. We see worldly embarrassment met

by cowardly yielding to the dictates of pride, or perhaps
to the more venial prompting of affection for those whom
his ruin will bow to the earth. Step by step the spirit
has been broken—perchance the habits and the moral rec.
titude deteriorated as well—until at length, in " the folly
of an hour," the unfortunate has fled to escape from the
pressure f his adversities and to hide his shame from
the world—has added domestic misery, of the deepest
and severest description, to the other and lighter
evils of the position of him and his. We will not
intrude our gaze into the household, where a father's
or a brother's folly has stricken the hearts of sor-
rowing and trembling relatives—where dark pictures
of possible calamity, or, darker still, of infamy and
crime, haunt each weary hour of absence and anxious
expectation. But let us turn, in imagination, to the se-
cond or third rate tavern, to which the voluntary outcast
has crept from his obscure lodging, to examine if, in the
daily records of passing events in this wilderness of acted
folly, his name is noted down and his flight commented
upon. Mark the furtive glance and the pallid and down-
cast features of the man, who so lately stood erect and
happy amongst his fellow men, on 'Change, or in the so-
cial circle! Watch the tremulous hand which raises the
paper, to read the doom

" He longs, yet dreads, to gaze upon !"
He has read the mystic words, which sink into his heart.
He has heard the warning, which will never cease to ring
in his ears, until its behests are obeyed,—that " the folly
of an hour" has been already pregnant with ruin, and
threatens " the lives of many" ;—and the strong man is a
child in his agony. Dare we speculate upon the after
course of such a wretched being ? We dare not. We
can only hope that the false step has, ere this, been re-
trieved ; that he has " faced his difficulties manfully,"
and received that sympathy, of which he was here kindly
assured.

Another and still darker history is conveyed in the fol
[owing:—

MO the PARTY who POSTS his LETTERS in
PRINCES-STREET, Leicester-square.--Your
Family is now in a state of excitement unbearable. Your
attention is called to an advertisement in Wednesday's
Morning Advertiser, headed " A body found drowned at
Deptford ;" after your avowal to your friend as to what
you might do, he has been to see the decomposed remains,
accompanied by others; the features are gone, but there
are marks on the arm, so that unless they hear from you
to-day it will satisfy them that the remains are those of
their misguided relative, and steps will be taken to place
them in the family vault, as they cannot bear the idea of
a pauper funeral.

This, too, is a record of ruin; but, apparently, of ruin
brought about by worse than mere folly or cowardly yield-
ing to misfortune. Here may be some noble intellect
wrecked by dissipation; the hope of some distinguished
circle, voluntarily embracing an outcast's lot, and looking
forward, at the end of the long vista of crime which he
has entered, to a suicide's grave. Are they, indeed, his
decomposed remains over which affection has vainly bent,
in some river-side hovel, or parish charnel-house, in the
effort totrace, so long after
" Decay's effacing fingers
Have swept the lines where beauty lingers,"
the resemblance of the once loved brother or cherished
son ? Is it over his corpse that the sable plumes have
waved—that the church's prayers have been said, amidst
the pomp of mourning, and the family vault has closed ;
or does some nameless child of misery mingle his ashes
there with those of the wealthy, the proud, or the far
descended? We know not. The world, which is not
comprised within that now mourning family circle, will
perhaps never know whether the erring one sleeps there,
or has returned, a penitent, to his father's mansion. A
privately-acted tragedy, this, upon which no public au-
dience shall sit in judgment.
Enough, however, upon this class of advertisements.
Turn we next to one of a more business-like character,
which contains, nevertheless, its own peculiar teachings.