40 BANKING-UNEMPLOYED CAPITAL. [1689-1714 collectors of the tax-money of the North, carrying their precious burden on sixteen horses, were attacked in Hertfordshire, and the treasure being borne off, all the horses were killed by the robbers to prevent pursuit. In the instructions of the "Complete Tradesman," at a much later period, we have grang House of the Hudson's Bay Company, Fenchurch Street. this form of entry in the "Account of Petty Cash":"To the Exeter carriers, for carriage of money, 15s. 3d." In 1694 the Bank of England was incorporated, and carried on its first operations, with fifty-four cashiers and clerks, in the hall of the Grocers' Company. This great Corporation commenced its functions under the most auspicious circumstances. Its subscribers anticipated the payment of a million two hundred thousand pounds of taxes voted by Parliament, and the Company was allowed eight per cent. upon the money advanced, besides an annual sum of four thousand pounds for management. The system which was recommended by the East India Company, under which the unemployed capital of noblemen, gentlemen, shopkeepers, widows, and orphans, could be made profitable, was coming to be understood. But the facilities for the development of the system were extremely few. Capital was raising its inarticulate voice for employment; and there were projectors at hand to hold out the most tempting prospects of increase, without labour and without risk, to the persons of every degree, whose money was unprofitably locked up in the strong-box. Evelyn, "Diary, "20th November. The age 1689-1714] PROJECTS FOR COMPANIES-LOTTERIES. 41 of Companies came very soon after the Revolution. No scheme of fraud, no delusion of folly, was transparent enough to make its victims stay their headlong pursuit of imaginary wealth. The mania never stopped. Severa years after the ruin which was produced by the infatuation of the South Sea scheme of which we shall make mention in due course-the management of Companies was thus spoken of: "We are so fond of Companies, it is a wonder we have not our shoes blacked by one, and a set of directors made rich at the expense of our very blackguards." The fluctuations, soon after the Revolution, in the price of shares-not only of "new projects and schemes, promising mountains of gold," but of the established trading Companies were so excessive, that the business of the Royal Exchange, in its stock-jobbing department, might be compared to the operations of a great gambling-house. Indeed, the spirit of gaming had taken possession of the people in the humblest as well as the highest transactions. In a Statute of 1698, it is recited that many evil-disposed persons, for divers years last past, had set up mischievous and unlawful games called Lotteries, in London and Westminster, and in other parts, and had fraudulently obtained great sums of money from unwary persons. The Lotteries were therefore declared to be public nuisances. But the newspapers of 1710 are full of the most curious advertisements of Lotteries, called Sales. Some tickets were as high as two guineas: many as low as sixpence.+ Mrs. Lowe, the milliner, next door to the Crown in Red Lion Street, has a sixpenny sale. Six houses in Limehouse, and £2499 in new fashionable plate, are to be disposed of by tickets, and the numbers are to be drawn by two parish boys, out of two wheels, at the Three Tun Tavern in Wood-street. There is even a twopenny sale, at the Pastry-cook's, at Porter's-block, near Smithfield.§ But there are signs of the cheats coming to an end. The sale of goods for £7500, to be drawn on Wednesday last, is postponed for weighty reasons; but it will certainly be drawn at Stationers' Hall, for eminent Counsel have given under their hands that this sale of goods is not within the Act for suppressing of Lotteries. The Act was passed; and the "heavy plate" and "stitched petticoats" had to find an honester market. Utterly opposed in principle to the spirit of Lotteries was the principle of Insurance. There were two Insurance Offices against Fire established before 1687-the Royal Exchange, and the Friendly Society. The Amicable Society for insuring Lives was chartered in 1706. But these most valuable institutions were imitated in a gambling spirit. Insurances upon births and marriages were opened; and became such covers for fraud that they were suppressed by Statute in 1710. The projectors of schemes for making all men suddenly rich,- the managers of fraudulent insurances-the sellers of plate, jewellery, and mercery by lottery-all these, and many others, who trafficked in human credulity, were exceptions to the general spirit of the English tradesman. In an age of somewhat loose morality amongst the higher classes, Burnet, writing in 1708, says, "As for the men of trade and business, they are, generally speaking, the best body in the nation; generous, sober, and charitable." He describes the inhabitants of cities as having more know. Advertisements in "Tatler," No. 239. Ibid., No. 252. "Augusta Triumphans." VOL. V.-128. Ibid. No. 245. 66 42 TRADESMEN-THEIR CHARACTER AND HABITS. [1689-1714. ledge, more zeal, and more charity, with a great deal more of devotion" than "the people in the country." Berkeley, who took a broader view of human affairs than the historian of his own time, points to "country gentlemen and farmers, and the better sort of tradesmen," as believers in the efficacy of virtue to make a nation happy, rather than as confiding in the power of wealth.* Burnet rather qualifies his praise of "the best body in the nation," by admitting that in the capital city "there may be too much of vanity, with too pompous an exterior." Of this vanity and pompous exterior there is various evidence. It was the natural result of a prosperous social condition, in which there were very few industrious men who were not bettering their circumstances. It may seem somewhat strange at a period not very far beyond a time when the income of an eminent merchant was taken at four hundred pounds a year, and that of a lesser merchant at not more than two hundred, that we find indications of a pompous exterior which would necessarily be very costly. We can understand how sir Josiah Child, who married his daughter to a duke's son, and gave her a portion of fifty thousand pounds, should have lived at a splendid mansion at Wanstead, and covered acres with his plantations. We do not wonder at the large expenditure of sir Robert Clayton, who changed the barren hills of Marden, in Surrey, into a scene that "represented some foreign country, which would produce spontaneously pines, firs, cypress, yew, holly, and juniper." But we cannot avoid thinking that the average mercantile income was underrated, when we know that the suburbs of London were full of country houses, to which merchants and retailers always repaired in the summer. Carshalton is described as crowded with fine houses of the citizens, some of which were built at profuse expense.§ Other parts of Surrey presented the same show of wealth, in such retreats of the traders, "who in their abundance make these gay excursions, and live thus deliciously all the summer, retiring within themselves in the winter, the better to lay up for the next summer's expense.” || The frugality of the citizen's London dwelling, over his shop or over his warehouse, must not be too readily assumed. "It is with no small concern that I behold," says a correspondent of Mr. Bickerstaff, "in coffee-houses and public places, my brethren, the tradesmen of this city put off the smooth, even, and ancient decorum of thriving citizens, for a fantastical dress and figure improper for their persons and characters." The tradesmen and shopkeepers even aspired "to keep footmen as well as the gentlemen; witness the infinite number of blue liveries, which are so common now that they are called the tradesmen's liveries." Again: Citizens and tradesmen's tables are now the emblems, not of plenty, but of luxury.” ** Three or four maidservants were said to be kept in a house, where two formerly were thought sufficient. Of course, there is the usual exaggeration in much of this complaint. One of the most certain indications of an improving state of the middle classes is the more luxurious nature of their diet; the wear of better clothing; the employ of more domestic servants; the furnishing their houses 66 'Alciphron," Works, vol. i. p. 337. Evelyn, "Diary," July 13, 1700. ** Complete Tradesman." § Defoe, "Tour," i. 232. 1689-1714.1 EXTENT OF LONDON. 43 with articles of improved taste. It does not necessarily follow that convenience is more costly than discomfort, or refinement than coarseness. The satirist is not always to be relied upon who looks back to a past generation for his models of virtuous simplicity. What was denounced as vanity and extravagance in Anne's reign, might be held up as the most pattern frugality, to shame the universal love of display in our time. The rebuilding of the City after the great Fire, was a work of marvellous energy, which offers an example, rarely paralleled, of public spirit. It was scarcely to be expected that there should have been no sacrifices to mere expediency; that a houseless population should have set about the work of reconstruction by raising up a city of wide streets instead of narrow alleys; and of regular architecture instead of the diversified adaptations to individua! means and wants. Yet much was accomplished. Brick or stone houses replaced those of timber and plaster; and light and air were not excluded by the topmost story of every house almost touching its opposite neighbour. London was made more convenient, but infinitely less picturesque. In one respect the new city was not so airy as the old. Gardens behind many of the opulent traders' houses, and large side-yards, were built over. The nobility had migrated from the East to the West, and their old mansions in Bishopsgate, and Houndsditch, and Barbican, with vast courts and offices, were covered with new squares. The fire of London gave habitations to a more numerous population; and it was asserted that when the City had been rebuilt, four thousand additional houses stood upon the area that was desolated by the fire. If the new shops and warehouses and dwellings had no great architectural pretensions, many public edifices had risen, which gave London a feature characteristic of its age. The churches which were destroyed had been mostly erected during the period when the old religion was in the ascendant. They were adapted to the ceremonials of Catholicism, and not for the accommodation of congregations to whom the sermon was the all-important part of public worship. It was fortunate that a man of real genius existed at the time of the Fire, who had a higher notion of the functions of an Architect than to produce copies of buildings belonging to a past age. It was fortunate that Sir Christopher Wren did not set about re-producing a Gothic St. Paul's, but, after the labour of thirty-five years, gave London the noblest Protestant Temple of the world. It was fortunate that instead of repeating in his new Parish Churches the gabled roofs and lancet windows of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, he left us, in his fifty-one Churches, built under every possible disadvantage, edifices of consummate beauty and variety in one great feature of their external appearance. He had to build these churches upon small areas, many behind the main streets. He made his very difficulties the main cause of his success. Wren, with consummate judgment, put his strength into his steeples and campanili, which soar above the sordid and dingy mass of habitations, and, clustering like satellites round the majestic dome of the Cathedral, impart to the general aspect of the city a picturesque grandeur scarcely rivalled by Rome itself." The accomplished artist from whom we quote truly characterises Wren as an inventor. After the fire of London, as the nobility and the opulent gentry had gone * Mr. A. Poynter, in "Pictorial History of England," vol. iv. p. 742. 44 PROGRESS OF FASHION WESTWARD. [1689-1714. Westward for their dwellings, the course of retail trade took the same direction. In the latter years of Charles II., the mercers occupied Paternoster Row; the street was built for them; it was thronged with coaches in two rows; the neighbouring streets were occupied by dependants upon the mercery trade, by the lacemen and fringe-sellers. Gradually the court came no longer to the city to buy its silks and velvets; and the mercers followed the court, and settled in Covent Garden. * Paternoster Row was deserted by the dealers in brocades, to be ultimately supplanted by the dealers in books, who, in like manner, deserted their old quarters in Little Britain. The "persons of quality" had begun to congregate a little north of Holborn. Great Ormond Street, with one side open to the fields, was a seat of fashion; and so was Bloomsbury Square. Spring Gardens, whose thickets were once the resort of gallants in laced ruffles and periwigs, and of ladies in masks, was now covered with gay houses. Covent Garden Square was the very centre of high life. Drury Lane had not quite lost the aristocratic perfume which belonged to Craven House and Clare House. The fashionable tenants of the side boxes of Drury Lane theatre, and of Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre, were not far removed from these two famous resorts of "the Town," which was now corrupted by Farquhar and Congreve, in lessons of human conduct only made more dangerous by their wit. Soho Square and St. James's Square were built before the Revolu tion. Golden Square was in fashion a quarter of a century later. The land of gentility was gradually stretching away still westward, in the direction of Piccadilly. But in 1708 Bolton Street was the most westerly street of London. Albemarle Street, to erect which Clarendon's proud mansion had been cleared away, was in an unfinished district of what are called "carcases," at the end of the eighteenth century. Squares were growing up towards Tyburn Road, which did not acquire its genteel name of Oxford Road, till it became the seat of a new Bear Garden. The hangman's cart duly travelled to the ancient gallows long after this road of deep sloughs had |