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THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSEREADER, in thy passage from the Bank - where thou hast been receiving thy half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean annuitant like myself) to the Flower Pot, to secure a place for Dalston, or Shacklewell, or some other thy suburbareat northerly, -- didst thou never observe a melancholy looking handsome, brid stone edifice, to the left -- where Threadneedle- street abuts upon Bishopsgate? I dare say thou hast often admired its magnifit portals ever gaping wide, and disclosing to v<s></s>iew a grave court, with cloisters and pillars, with few or no traces of goers-in or ers-out -- a desolation something like Balcluthas. This was once a house of trade, -- a tre of busy is. The throng of merts was here -- the quick pulse of gain -- and here some forms of business are still kept up, though the soul be long since fled. Here are still to be seen stately porticos; imposing staircases; offices roomy as the state apartments in palaces deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling clerks; the still more sacred interiors of court and ittee rooms, with venerable faces of beadles, doorkeepers -- directors seated in form on solemn days (to proclaim a dead dividend,) at long worm-eaten tables, that have been mahogany, with tarnished gilt-leather cs, supp massy silver inkstands long since dry -- the oaken wainscots hung with pictures of deceased governors and sub-governors, of queen Anne, and the two first monarchs of the Brunswick dynasty; -- huge charts, which subsequent discoveries have antiquated; -- dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams,-- and soundings of the Bay of Panama! -- The long passages hung with buckets, appended, in idle row, to walls, whose substance might defy any, short of the last, flagration: -- with vast ranges of cellarage under all, where dollars and pieces of eight once lay, an "unsunned heap," for Mammon to have solaced his solitary heart withal, -- long since dissipated, or scattered into air at the blast of the breaking of that famous BUBBLE.
[Footnote] * I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were desolate. -- Ossian.
Such is the SOUTH SEA-HOUSE. At least, such it was forty years ago, when I k, -- a magnifit relic! What alterations may have been made in it since, I have had no opportunities of verifying. Time, I take franted, has not freshe. No wind has resuscitated the face of the sleeping waters. A thicker crust by this time stagnates upon it. The moths, that were then battening upon its obsolete ledgers and day-books, have rested from their depredations, but ht geions have succeeded, making fine fretwork among their single and double entries. Layers of dust have accumulated (a superfoetation of dirt!) upon the old layers, that seldom used to be disturbed, save by some curious finger, now and then, inquisitive to explore the mode of book-keeping in Queen Annes reign; or, with less hallowed curiosity, seeking to unveil some of the mysteries of that tremendous HOAX, whose extent the petty peculators of our day look back upon with the same expression of incredulous admiration, and hopeless ambition of rivalry, as would bee the puny faodern spiraplating the Titan size of Vauxs superhuman plot.
Peace to the manes of the BUBBLE! Silend destitution are upon thy walls, proud house, for a memorial!
Situated as thou art, in the very heart of stirring and living erce, -- amid the fret and fever of speculation -- with the Bank, and the `ge, and the India-house about thee, in the hey-day of present prosperity, with their important faces, as it were, insulting thee, their poor neighbour out of business -- to the idle and merely plative,to such as me, old house! there is a charm in thy quie<big>.99lib.</big>t -- a cessation -- a ess from business -- an indolence almost cloistral -- which is delightful! With what reverence have I paced thy great bare rooms and courts at evehey spoke of the past -- the shade of some dead atant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, stiff as in life. Living ats and atants puzzle me. I have no skill in figuring. But thy great dead tomes, which scarce three degee clerks of the present day could lift from their enshrining shelves with their old fantastic flourishes, and decorative rubriterlag their sums in triple niations, set down with formal superfluity of cyphers with pious sente the beginning, without which ious aors never veo open a book of business, or bill of lading -- the costly vellum covers of some of them almost persuading us that we are got into some better library, are very agreeable and edifying spectacles. I look upon these defunct dragons with placy. Thy heavy odd-shaped ivory-handled penknives (our aors had every thing on a larger scale than we have hearts for) are as good as any thing from Hereum. The pounce-boxes of our days have gorograde.
The very clerks which I remember in the South Sea-House-I speak of forty years back-had an air very different from those in the public offices that I have had to do with sihey partook of the genius of the place!
They were mostly (for the establishment did not admit of superfluous salaries) bachelenerally (for they had not much to do) persons of a curious and speculative turn of mind. Old-fashioned, for a reasoioned before. Humorists, for they were of all descriptions; and, not having been brought together in early life (which has a tendency to assimilate the members of corporate bodies to each other), but, for the most part, placed in this house in ripe or middle age, they necessarily carried into it their separate habits and oddities, unqualified, if I may so speak, as into a on stock. Hehey formed a sort of Noahs ark. Odd fishes. A lay-monastery. Domestic retainers in a great house, kept more for show than use. Yet pleasant fellows, full of chat -- and not a few among them had arrived at siderable profi the German flute.
The cashier at that time was one Evans, a Cambro-Briton. He had something of the choleriplexion of his trymen stamped on his visage, but was a worthy sensible man at bottom. He wore his hair, to the last, powdered and frizzed out, in the fashion which I remember to have seen in caricatures of what were termed, in my young days, Macies. He was the last of that race of beaux. Melancholy as a gib-cat over his ter all the forenoon, I think I see him, making up his cash (as they call it) with tremulous fin<code>九九藏书</code>gers, as if he feared every one about him was a defaulter; in his hypodry ready to imagine himself one; haunted, at least, with the idea of the possibility of his being one: his tristful visage clearing up a little over his roast neck of veal at Aons at two (where his picture still hangs, taken a little before his death by desire of the master of the coffee-house, which he had frequented for the last five-and-twenty years), but not attaining the meridian of its animation till evening brought on the hour of tea and visiting. The simultaneous sound of his well-kno at the door with the stroke of the clonoung six, ic of never-failing mirth in the families which this dear old bachelladdened with his presehen was his forte, his glorified hour! How would he chirp, and expand, over a muffin! How would he dilate into secret history ! His tryman, Pennant himself in particular, could not be more eloquent than he iion to old and new London -- the site of old theatres, churches, streets goo decay -- where Rosamonds pond stood -- the Mulberry-gardens -- and the duit in Cheap -- with many a pleasant ae, derived from paternal tradition, of those grotesque figures which Hogarth has immortalized in his picture of Noon, -- the worthy desdants of those heroifessors, who, flying to this try, from the wrath of Louis the Fourteenth and his dragoons, kept alive the flame of pure religion in the sheltering obscurities of Hog-lane, and the viity of the Seven Dials!
Deputy, under Evans, was Thomas Tame. He had the air and stoop of a nobleman. You would have taken him for one, had you met him in one of the passages leading to Westminster-hall. By stoop, I mean that gentle bending of the body forwards, which, i men, must be supposed to be the effect of an habitual desding attention to the applications of their inferiors. While he held you in verse, you felt straio the height in the colloquy. The ference over, you were at leisure to smile at the parative insignifice of the pretensions which had just awed you. His intellect was of the shallowest order. It did not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its inal state of white paper. A sug babe might have posed him. What was it then? Was he rich? Alas, no! Thomas Tame was very poor. Both he and his wife looked outwardly gentlefolks, when I fear all was not well at all times within. She had a meagre person, which it was evident she had not sinned in over-pampering; but in its veins was noble blood. She traced her dest, by some labyrinth of relationship, which I hhly uood, -- much less explain with any heraldic certainty at this time of day, -- to the illustrious, but unfortunate house of Derwentwater. This was the secret of Thomass stoop. This was the thought -- the se -- the bright solitary star of your lives, -- ye mild and happy pair, -- which cheered you in the night of intellect, and in the obscurity of your station! This was to you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead of glittering attais: and it was worth them all together. You insulted h it; but, while you wore it as a piece of defensive armour only, no insult likewise could reach you through it. Decus et solamen.
Of quite aamp was the then atant, John Tipp. He her preteo high blood, nor in good truth cared one fig about the matter. He "thought an atant the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest atant in it." Yet John was not without his hobby. The fiddle relieved his vat hours. He sang, certainly, with other han to the Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, scream and scrape most abominably. His fine suite of official rooms in Threadneedle-street, which, without any thing very substantial appeo them, were enough to enlarge a mans notions of himself that lived in them, (I know not who is the occupier of them now) resounded fhtly to the notes of a cert of "sweet breasts," as our aors would have called them, culled from club-rooms and orchestras -- chorus singers -- first and sed violoncellos -- double basses -- and clarios who ate his utton, and drank his punch, and praised his ear. He sate like Lord Midas among them. But at the desk Tipp was quite another sort of creature. Thence all ideas, that were purely oral, were banished. You could not speak of any thing romantic without rebuke. Politics were excluded. A neer was thought too refined and abstracted. The whole duty of man sisted in writing off dividend warrants. The striking of the annual balan the pany<u>藏书网</u>s books (which, perhaps, differed from the balance of last year in the sum of 25l. 1s. 6d.) occupied his days and nights for a month previous. Not that Tipp was blind to the deadness of things (as they call them iy) in his beloved house, or did not sigh for a return of the old stifling days when South Sea hopes were young -- (he was indeed equal to the wielding of any the most intricate ats of the most flourishing pany in these or those days) : -- but to a genuine atant the difference of proceeds is as nothing. The fraal farthing is as dear to his heart as the thousands which stand before it. He is the true actor, who, whether his part be a prince or a peasant, must act it with like iy. With Tipp form was every thing. His life was formal. His as seemed ruled with a ruler. His pen was not less erring than his heart. He made the best executor in the world: he lagued with incessant executorships accly, which excited his spleen and soothed his vanity in equal ratios. He would swear (for Tipp swore) at the little orphans, whhts he would guard with a tenacity like the grasp of the dying hand, that eheir is to his prote. With all this there was about him a sort of timidity -- (his few enemies used to give it a worse name) something which, in revereo thg dead, we will place, if you please, a little on this side of the heroiature certainly had been pleased to endow John Tipp with a suffit measure of the principle of self-preservation. There is a cowardice which we do not despise, because it has nothing base or treacherous in its elements; it betrays itself, not you: it is mere temperament; the absence of the romantid the enterprising; it sees a lion in the way, and will not, with Fortinbras, "greatly find quarrel in a straw," when somg supposed honour is at stake. Tipp never mouhe box of a stage-coa his life; or leaned against the rails of a baly; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet; or looked dorecipice; or let off a gun; or went upon a water-party; or would willingly let you go if he could have helped it: her was it recorded of him, that for lucre, or for intimidation, he ever forsook friend or principle.
Whom shall we summon from the dusty dead, in whom on qualities bee unon? I fet thee, Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters, the author, of the South Sea House? who never e thy offi a m, or quittedst it in mid-day -- (what didst thou in an office ?) -- without some quirk that left a sting! Thy gibes and thy jokes are inct, or survive but in twotten volumes, which I had the good fortuo rescue from a sta<dfn>99lib?</dfn>ll in Barbi, not three days ago, and found thee terse, fresh, epigrammatic, as alive. Thy wit is a little gone by in these fastidious days -- thy topics are staled by the "new-bauds" of the time -- but great thou used to be in Public Ledgers, and in icles, upon Chatham, and Shelburne, and Rogham, and Howe, and Burgoyne, and ton, and the war whided iearing from Great Britain her rebellious ies, -- and Keppel, and Wilkes, and Sawbridge, and Bull, and Dunning, and Pratt, and Rid, -- and such small politics. -
A little less facetious, and a great deal more Obstreperous, was fitling, rattleheaded Plumer. He was desded, -- not in a right line, reader, (for his lineal pretensions, like his personal, favoured a little of the sinister bend) from the Plumers of Hertfordshire. So tradition gave him out; aain family features not a little saned the opinioainly old Walter Plumer (his reputed author) had been a rake in his days, and visited mu Italy, and had seen the world. He was uncle, bachelor-uo the fine old whig still living, who has represehe ty in so many successive parliaments, and has a fine old mansion near Ware. Walter flourished in Gee the Seds days, and was the same who was summoned before the House of ons about a business of franks, with the old Duchess of Marlbh. You may read of it in Johnsons Life of Cave. Cave came off cleverly in that business. It is certain our Plumer did nothing to distehe rumour. He rather seemed pleased whe was, with all gentleness, insinuated. But, besides his family pretensions, Plumer was an engaging fellow, and sang gloriously. -
Not so sweetly sang Plumer as thou sa, mild, child-like, pastoral M -- ; a flutes breathing less divinely whispering than thy Arcadian melodies, when, in tones worthy of Arden, thou didst t that song sung by Amiens to the banished Duke, which proclaims the winter wind more lehan for a man to be ungrateful. Thy sire was old surly M --, the unapproachable churchwarden of Bishopsgate. He knew not what he did, when he begat thee, like spring, gentle offspring of blustering winter : -- only unfortunate in thy ending, which should have been mild, ciliatory, swan-like. -
Much remains to sing. Many fantastic shapes rise up, but they must be mine in private -- already I have fooled the reader to the top of his bent ; -- else could I omit that strange creature Woollett, who existed in trying the question, and bought litigations ? -- and still stranger, inimitable, solemn Hepworth, from whose gravity on might have deduced the law of gravitation. How profoundly would he nib a pen -- with what deliberation would he wet a wafer ! --
P> But it is time to close -- nights wheels are rattling fast over me -- it is proper to have doh this solemn mockery.
Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while -- peradvehe very names, which I have summoned up before thee, are fantastisubstantial like Henry Pimpernel, and old John Naps of Greece : --
Be satisfied that something answering to them has had a being. Their importance is from the past.
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