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THE ESSAYS OF ELIA.

THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE.

READER, in thy passage from the Bank-pictures of deceased governors and subwhere thou hast been receiving thy half-governors, of Queen Anne, and the two first yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean monarchs of the Brunswick dynasty :-huge annuitant like myself)—to the Flower Pot, charts, which subsequent discoveries have to secure a place for Dalston, or Shacklewell, antiquated; dusty maps of Mexico, dim as or some other thy suburban retreat northerly, dreams, and soundings of the Bay of -didst thou never observe a melancholy- Panama! The long passages hung with looking, handsome, brick and stone edifice, buckets, appended, in idle row, to walls, to the left-where Threadneedle-street abuts whose substance might defy any, short of the upon Bishopsgate? I dare say thou hast last, conflagration:-with vast ranges of often admired its magnificent portals ever cellarage under all, where dollars and piecesgaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave of-eight once lay, an unsunned heap," for court, with cloisters, and pillars, with few or Mammon to have solaced his solitary heart no traces of goers-in or comers-out-a desola- withal,-long since dissipated, or scattered tion something like Balclutha's.* into air at the blast of the breaking of that famous BUBBLE.

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Such is the SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. At least, such it was forty years ago, when I knew it, -a magnificent relic! What alterations may have been made in it since, I have had no opportunities of verifying. Time, I take for granted, has not freshened it. 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 daybooks, have rested from their depredations, but other light generations have succeeded, making fine fretwork among their single and double entries. Layers of dust have accu

This was once a house of trade,-a centre of busy interests. The throng of merchants 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 committeerooms, 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 coverings, supporting massy silver inkstands long since mulated (a superfœtation of dirt!) upon the dry; the oaken wainscots hung with

I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were desolate.-OSSIAN.

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 Anne's 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 become the puny face of modern conspiracy contemplating the Titan size of Vaux's superhuman plot.

Peace to the manes of the BUBBLE! Silence and destitution are upon thy walls, proud house, for a memorial!

with since. They partook of the genius of the place!

They were mostly (for the establishment did not admit of superfluous salaries) bachelors. Generally (for they had not much to do) persons of a curious and speculative turn of mind. Old-fashioned, for a reason mentioned before. Humourists, 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 common stock. Hence they formed a sort of Noah's 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 considerable proficiency on the German flute.

The cashier at that time was one Evans, a

Situated as thou art, in the very heart of stirring and living commerce,-amid the fret and fever of speculation-with the Bank, and the 'Change, 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 contemplative, -to such as me, old house! there is a charm in thy quiet a cessation-a coolness from business-an indolence almost cloistralwhich is delightful! With what reverence Cambro-Briton. He had something of the have I paced thy great bare rooms and choleric complexion of his countrymen courts at eventide! They spoke of the past: stamped on his visage, but was a worthy -the shade of some dead accountant, with sensible man at bottom. He wore his hair, visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, stiff to the last, powdered and frizzed out, in as in life. Living accounts and accountants the fashion which I remember to have seen puzzle me. I have no skill in figuring. But in caricatures of what were termed, in my thy great dead tomes, which scarce three young days, Maccaronies. He was the last degenerate clerks of the present day could of that race of beaux. Melancholy as a giblift from their enshrining shelves-with their cat over his counter all the forenoon, I think old fantastic flourishes, and decorative rubric I see him, making up his cash (as they call interlacings their sums in triple columnia- it) with tremulous fingers, as if he feared tions, set down with formal superfluity of every one about him was a defaulter; in his ciphers with pious sentences at the be- hypochondry ready to imagine himself one; ginning, without which our religious ances- haunted, at least, with the idea of the possitors never ventured to open a book of busi- bility of his becoming one; his tristful ness, or bill of lading-the costly vellum visage clearing up a little over his roast neck covers of some of them almost persuading of veal at Anderton's at two (where his us that we are got into some better library,- picture still hangs, taken a little before his are very agreeable and edifying spectacles. death by desire of the master of the coffeeI can look upon these defunct dragons with house, which he had frequented for the last complacency. Thy heavy odd-shaped ivory- five-and-twenty years), but not attaining the handled pen-knives (our ancestors had every-meridian of its animation till evening brought thing on a larger scale than we have hearts on the hour of tea and visiting. The simulfor) are as good as anything from Hercu-taneous sound of his well-known rap at the laneum. The pounce-boxes of our days have door with the stroke of the clock announcing gone retrograde.

six, was a topic of never-failing mirth in the The very clerks which I remember in the families which this dear old bachelor gladSouth-Sea House-I speak of forty years dened with his presence. Then was his back-had an air very different from those forte, his glorified hour! How would he in the public offices that I have had to do chirp, and expand, over a muffin! How

would he dilate into secret history! His of glittering attainments: and it was worth countryman, Pennant himself, in particular, them all together. You insulted none with could not be more eloquent than he in it; but, while you wore it as a piece of defenrelation to old and new London-the site sive armour only, no insult likewise could of old theatres, churches, streets gone to reach you through it. Decus et solamen. decay-where Rosamond's Pond stood-the Mulberry gardens-and the Conduit in Cheap-with many a pleasant anecdote, derived from paternal tradition, of those grotesque figures which Hogarth has immortalised in his picture of Noon, -the worthy descendants of those heroic confessors, who, flying to this country, from the wrath of Louis the Fourteenth and his dragoons, kept alive the flame of pure religion in the sheltering obscurities of Hoglane, and the vicinity of the Seven Dials!

Of quite another stamp was the then accountant, John Tipp. He neither pretended to high blood, nor, in good truth, cared one fig about the matter. He "thought an accountant the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest accountant in it." Yet John was not without his hobby. The fiddle relieved his vacant hours. He sang, certainly, with other notes than to the Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, scream and scrape most abominably. His fine suite of official rooms in Threadneedle-street, which, without anyDeputy, under Evans, was Thomas Tame. thing very substantial appended to them, He had the air and stoop of a nobleman. were enough to enlarge a man's notions of You would have taken him for one, had you himself that lived in them, (I know not who met him in one of the passages leading to is the occupier of them now,) resounded Westminster-hall. By stoop, I mean that fortnightly to the notes of a concert of "sweet gentle bending of the body forwards, which, breasts," as our ancestors would have called in great men, must be supposed to be the them, culled from club-rooms and orchestras effect of an habitual condescending atten--chorus-singers-first and second violontion to the applications of their inferiors. cellos-double-basses-and clarionets-who While he held you in converse, you felt ate his cold mutton, and drank his punch, and strained to the height in the colloquy. The conference over, you were at leisure to smile at the comparative insignificance 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 original state of white paper. A sucking-babe might have posed him. What abstracted. The whole duty of man conwas it then? Was he rich? Alas, no!sisted in writing off dividend warrants. The 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 neat meagre person, which it was evident she had not sinned in over-pampering; but in its veins was noble blood. She traced her descent, by some labyrinth of relationship, which I never thoroughly understood, much less can explain with any heraldic certainty at this time of day, -to the illustrious, but unfortunate house of Derwentwater. This was the secret of Thomas's stoop. This was the thoughtthe sentiment-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

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 ornamental, were banished. You could not speak of anything romantic without rebuke. Politics were excluded. A newspaper was thought too refined and

striking of the annual balance in the company'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 Tip was blind to the deadness of things (as they call them in the city) in his beloved house, or did not sigh for a return of the old stirring days when South-Sea hopes were young-(he was indeed equal to the wielding of any the most intricate accounts of the most flourishing company in these or those days):-but to a genuine accountant the difference of proceeds is as nothing. The fractional 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 intensity. With Tipp

A little less facetious, and a great deal more obstreperous, was fine rattling, rattleheaded Plumer. He was descended,—not in a right line, reader, (for his lineal pretensions, like his personal, favoured a little of thé sinister bend,) from the Plumers of

form was everything. His life was formal. and Rockingham, and Howe, and Burgoyne, His actions seemed ruled with a ruler. His and Clinton, and the war which ended in pen was not less erring than his heart. He the tearing from Great Britain her rebellious made the best executor in the world; he colonies, and Keppel, and Wilkes, and was plagued with incessant executorships Sawbridge, and Bull, and Dunning, and accordingly, which excited his spleen and Pratt, and Richmond, - and such small soothed his vanity in equal ratios. He would politics.swear (for Tipp swore) at the little orphans, whose rights he would guard with a tenacity like the grasp of the dying hand, that commended their interests to his protection. With all this there was about him a sort of timidity-(his few enemies used to give it a worse name)—a something which, in reve- Hertfordshire. So tradition gave him out; rence to the dead, we will place, if you please, a little on this side of the heroic. Nature certainly had been pleased to endow John Tipp with a sufficient 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 romantic and the enterprising; it sees a lion in the way, and will not, with Fortinbras, "greatly find quarrel in a straw," when some supposed honour is at stake. Tipp never mounted the box of a stage-coach in his life; or leaned against the rails of a balcony; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet; or looked down a precipice; or let off a gun; or went upon a water-party; or would willingly let you go, if he could have helped it neither was it recorded of him, that for lucre, or for intimidation, he ever forsook friend or principle.

Whom next shall we summon from the dusty dead, in whom common qualities become uncommon? Can I forget thee, Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters, the author, of the South-Sea House? who never enteredst thy office in a morning, 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 now extinct, or survive but in two forgotten volumes, which I had the good fortune to rescue from a stall in Barbican, 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-born gauds" of the time :-but great thou used to be in Public Ledgers, and in Chronicles, upon Chatham, and Shelburne,

and certain family features not a little sanctioned the opinion. Certainly old Walter Plumer (his reputed author) had been a rake in his days, and visited much in Italy, and had seen the world. He was uncle, bacheloruncle to the fine old whig still living, who has represented the county in so many successive parliaments, and has a fine old mansion near Ware. Walter flourished in George the Second's days, and was the same who was summoned before the House of Commons about a business of franks, with the old Duchess of Marlborough. You may read of it in Johnson's Life of Cave. Cave came off cleverly in that business. It is certain our Plumer did nothing to discountenance the rumour. He rather seemed pleased whenever it 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 sangest, mild, child-like, pastoral M— ; a flute's breathing less divinely whispering than thy Arcadian melodies, when, in tones worthy of Arden, thou didst chant that song sung by Amiens to the banished Duke, which proclaims the winter wind more lenient than 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, conciliatory, 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? Reader, what if I have been playing with - and still stranger, inimitable, solemn thee all this while ?-peradventure the very Hepworth, from whose gravity Newton names, which I have summoned up before might have deduced the law of gravitation. thee, are fantastic insubstantial like How profoundly would he nib a pen Henry Pimpernel, and old John Naps of with what deliberation would he wet a Greece :wafer!

But it is time to close-night's wheels are rattling fast over me-it is proper to have done with this solemn mockery.

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Be satisfied that something answering to them has had a being. Their importance is from the past.

OXFORD IN THE VACATION.

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CASTING a preparatory glance at the bottom the flowery carpet-ground of a midnight disof this article as the wary connoisseur in sertation. It feels its promotion. prints, with cursory eye (which, while it So that you see, upon the whole, the literary reads, seems as though it read not), never dignity of Elia is very little, if at all, comfails to consult the quis sculpsit in the corner, promised in the condescension. before he pronounces some rare piece to be a Vivares, or a Woollet- -methinks I hear you exclaim, reader, Who is Elia?

Because in my last I tried to divert thee with some half-forgotten humours of some old clerks defunct, in an old house of business, long since gone to decay, doubtless you have already set me down in your mind as one of the self-same college-a votary of the desk―a notched and cropt scrivener one that sucks his sustenance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill.

Not that, in my anxious detail of the many commodities incidental to the life of a public office, I would be thought blind to certain flaws, which a cunning carper might be able to pick in this Joseph's vest. And here I must have leave, in the fulness of my soul, to regret the abolition, and doing-away-with altogether, of those consolatory interstices and sprinklings of freedom, through the four seasons,—the red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days. There was Paul, and Stephen, and Barnabas—

Well, I do agnize something of the sort. I confess that it is my humour, my fancy—in the fore-part of the day, when the mind of your man of letters requires some relaxation -(and none better than such as at first sight seems most abhorrent from his beloved studies)—to while away some good hours of my time in the contemplation of indigos, cottons, raw silks, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise. In the first place and then it sends you home with such in- the defalcation of Iscariot-so much did we creased appetite to your books

Andrew and John, men famous in old times

-we were used to keep all their days holy as long back as I was at school at Christ's. I remember their effigies, by the same token,, in the old Basket Prayer Book. There hung Peter in his uneasy posture holy Bartlemy in the troublesome act of flaying, after the famous Marsyas by Spagnoletti.I ho*noured them all, and could almost have wept

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*love to keep holy memories sacred:-only methought I a little grudged at the coalition of the better Jude with Simon-clubbing (as it were) their sanctities together, to make up one poor gaudy-day between them—as an economy unworthy of the dispensation.

not to say, that your outside sheets, and waste wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them, most kindly and naturally, the impression of sonnets, epigrams, essays—so that the very parings of a counting-house are, in some sort, the settings up of an author. The enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning among the cart-rucks of figures and ciphers, frisks and curvets so at its ease over

These were bright visitations in a scholar's and a clerk's life-" far off their coming shone."-I was as good as an almanac in those days. I could have told you such a

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