We cannot attempt to give a history of the Bank of England in our limited space, but a short account of the Bank building may not unfitly close this notice of the founder of the establishment. The business was originally started at Mercers' Hall, and next removed to, and for many years carried on at, Grocers' Hall in the Poultry. In August, 1732, the governors and directors laid the first stone of their new building in Threadneedle Street, on the site of the house and garden formerly belonging to Sir John Houblon, the first Governor of the Bank. At first the buildings comprised only the centre of the principal or south front, the Hall, Bullion Court, and the Courtyard, and were surrounded by St. Christopher-le-Stocks Church, three taverns, and several private houses. From the year 1766 onwards considerable additions were made to the building. All the adjoining houses on the east side to Bartholomew Lane, and those occupying the west side of that lane almost to Lothbury, were taken down, and their places occupied by offices of the Bank. The south side buildings, forming the eastern continuation of the establishment, presented a range of fluted columns in pairs, with arched intervals between, pointing out where windows should have been placed, which, however, were filled up with stone. This necessitated the rooms within being lighted by small glass domes in the roof, a circumstance much complained of at the time by the clerks as injuriously affecting their eyes. It was intended to extend the façade on the western side by taking down the Church of St. Christopher, which by the removal of that part of Threadneedle Street had been deprived of a great part of its parish. Noorthouck, who wrote in 1773, says: 'How far so extensive a plan may answer the vast expense it will call for to complete it is a question proper for the consideration of those who are immediately concerned; an indifferent spectator cannot view this expanded fabric without comparing it with the growth of public debts negotiated here, and trembling more for the safety of the one than of the other.' Could he see the Bank now, covering nearly four acres of ground, what would he say?
One Ralph, architect, whose 'Critical Review of the Buildings, Statues, and Ornaments in and about London' was published in 1783, says: 'The building erected for the Bank is liable to the very same objection, in point of place, with the Royal Exchange, and even in a greater, too. It is monstrously crowded on the eye, and unless the opposite houses could be pulled down, and a view obtained into Cornhill, we might as well be entertained with a prospect of the model through a microscope. As to the structure itself, it is grand ... only the architect seems to be rather too fond of decoration; this appears pretty eminently by the weight of his cornices ... rather too heavy for the building.' The objectionable buildings here referred to were the triangular block of houses which formerly stood in front of the old Royal Exchange, but was removed on the building of the new.
At the beginning of this century the Bank on the south side was of the same extent as now; on the east side also it extended to Lothbury, on the west it reached to about half the length of the present Princes Street, which, however, then did not proceed in a straight line, as it does now, but took a sharp turn to north-east, coming into Lothbury at a point nearly opposite St. Margaret's Church, and thus cutting off a corner of the Bank site, which would otherwise have been nearly square. But when, early in this century, Princes Street was extended in a straight line to Lothbury, the condensed portion of the street, together with a block of houses on the west side of it, were added to the Bank site, and the Bank assumed its present shape. But great architectural improvements had in the meantime been introduced. The original or central portion, eighty feet in length, which was of the Ionic order raised on a rusticated basement, was altered to what it now is; the attic seen on it was added in 1850. This original portion was from the design of George Sampson. The east and west wings were added by Sir Robert Taylor, after whom Sir John Soane was appointed the Bank architect, and he rebuilt many of those parts constructed by Sampson and Taylor; and on Sir John's death in 1837 Mr. Cockerell succeeded him in the position. He again greatly modified many features of the building. The eighty feet of the original south side now extend to 365 feet; the length of the west side is 440 feet, of the north side 410 feet, and of the east side 245 feet. Both internally and externally classical models have been followed. The hall known as the Three Per Cent. Consol (three per cent., alas! gone) Office, ninety feet long by fifty wide, is designed from models of the Roman baths, as are the Dividend and Bank Stock Offices. The chief cashier's office is forty-five feet by thirty, and designed after the Temple of the Sun and Moon at Rome. The Court Room of the composite order, about sixty feet long and thirty-one wide, is lighted by large Venetian windows on the south, overlooking what once was the churchyard of St. Christopher's Church, and into which in 1852 a fountain was placed, which throws a single jet, thirty feet high, amongst the branches of two of the finest lime-trees in London. The north side of the Court Room is remarkable for three exquisite chimney-pieces of statuary marble. The original Rotunda was roofed in with timber, but in 1794 it was found advisable to take it down, and the present Rotunda was built, which measures fifty-seven feet in diameter, and about the same in height; it is of incombustible material, as are all the offices erected by Sir John Soane. There are a number of courts within the outer walls of the buildings; they are all of great architectural beauty; the one entered from Lothbury is truly magnificent. It has screens of fluted Corinthian columns, supporting a lofty entablature, surmounted by vases. This part of the edifice was copied from the beautiful temple of the Sybils, near Tivoli. A noble arch, an imitation of the arch of Constantine at Rome, gives access to the Bullion Court, in which is another row of Corinthian columns, supporting an entablature, decorated with statues representing the four quarters of the globe. The north-west corner of the Bank is modelled on the temple of Vesta at Rome. We have yet to mention the Old Lady's Drawing-Room, or the pay-office, where bank-notes are issued, or exchanged for cash. It is a fine hall, seventy-nine feet long by forty wide, and we have left the mention of it to the last because it suggests to us some particular reflections. We have seen that Paterson was the real founder of the Bank of England, and we may take this opportunity of adding that Charles Montague and Michael Godfrey are entitled to share in Paterson's glory for the assistance they lent him in this undertaking; but the Bank ignores its founder, and had not even a portrait of him till Mr. James Hogg, the founder of London Society, presented them with one. In the Pay Hall stands the statue of William III., and in the Latin inscription underneath he is called 'founder of the Bank.' It is the old story: when a prize is taken at sea the biggest share of it, the lion's share, goes to the 'Flag'; the real fighters must put up with the leavings.
Let us end with another philosophical reflection. Facts are more astounding than fiction, as we will show by two facts. Gaboriau's novel 'La Dégringolade' (The Downfall), in one of its earliest chapters describes the opening of a grave in the Parisian cemetery of Montmartre, to discover whether it contains the body of a certain person or not. The coffin is found to be empty. This is a fiction, but are we not likely to see its realization shortly? Paul Féval's romance 'Les Mystères de Londres' gives a long account of the fictitious attempt of some villains to get at the treasures in the cellars of the Bank of England by digging a tunnel under Threadneedle Street; they are, of course, foiled in the end. But now, according to accounts published at the end of the month of November, 1898, in the Daily Mail, the tunnel is actually dug by a railway company, and so close to the walls of the Bank as to actually compel its governors and directors to call in the assistance of Sir John Wolfe Barry to advise means to avert the danger which threatens the building, already affected by the excavations. Truly fact is stranger than fiction.
XIV.
THE OLD DOCTORS.
The lines of modern doctors have fallen in pleasant places. Their position is certainly somewhat different from what it was in the days when they were contemptuously called leeches, when their scientific investigations exposed them to persecution and death. Vesalius, the father of modern anatomy, was condemned to death by the Inquisition for dissecting a human body, but by the intervention of King Philip II., whose physician he was, the punishment was reduced to a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; on his return the ship was lost on the island of Zante, where he perished of starvation in 1564. Now Government licenses doctors to practise vivisection! At Dijon, in 1386, a physician was fined by the bailiff fifty golden francs, and imprisoned for not having completed the cures of some persons whose recovery he had undertaken. In a schedule of the offices, fees, and services which the Lord Wharton had with the Wardenry of the city and castle of Carlisle in 1547, a trumpeter was rated at 16d. per day, and a surgeon only at 12d. Edward III. granted Counsus de Gangeland, an apothecary of London, 6d. a day for his care and attendance on him while he formerly lay sick in Scotland. A knowledge of astrology was in those days requisite for a physician; the herbs were not to be gathered except when the sun and the planets were in certain constellations, and certificates of their being so were necessary to give them reputation. Sometimes patients applied to astrologers, who were astrologers only, whether the constellations were favourable to the doctor's remedies. Then, if the man died, the astrologer ascribed the death to the inefficacy of the remedies, while the doctor threw the blame on the astrologer, he not having properly observed the constellations. Then the latter would exclaim that his case was extremely hard; if he made a mistake, his calculation being wrong, heaven discovered it, whilst if a physician was guilty of a blunder, the earth covered it. Even then doctors were considered like the potato plant, whose fruit is underground. To see the doctor's carriage, whose motto should be 'Live or die,' or 'Morituri te salutant,' attending a funeral, reminds a cynic of a cobbler taking home his work.
In England the medical profession rose in public estimation from the time when Henry VIII., with that view, incorporated several members of the profession into a body, community, and perpetual college, since called the College of Physicians. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their opposite characteristics of vulgarity and romance, of squalor and luxury, of ignorance and grand discoveries in science, of prejudice and intelligence, were highly conducive to the formation and cultivation of individualism and originality of character; hence those two centuries abounded in 'oddities' and 'eccentricities,' and in no section of society more than in the medical. The members of that profession could very readily and appropriately then be divided into two great schools—the Rough and the Smooth, the fierce dispensers of Brimstone and the gentle administrators of Treacle. The present century, with its levelling tendencies, opposed to all originality and so-called eccentricity in speech, custom, and costume, reducing all gentlemen in full dress to the rank of waiters, has nearly abolished the sulphury Galen; in fact, he would scarcely be tolerated now. People submit to certain foolish pretensions now, such as those of thought-reading and pin-hunting cranks, and similar mental eccentricities; but they must be administered mildly, there must be a treacly flavour about them, for—
'This is an age of flatness, dull and dreary,
Society is like a washed-out chintz,
Which scandal renders somewhat foul and smeary;
And yet, without its malice, lies, and hints,
E'en fashion's children would at last grow weary
Of looking at the faded cotton prints
To which respectability subdues
Our uncontrolled imagination's hues.'
Hence the medical showmen of the present day must accompany the 'exhibition' of their nostrums with dulcet sounds and honeyed speeches, especially when treating those nursed in the lap of affluence; and, accustomed as they are to adulation, the medico who can condescend to feed them with well-disguised flattery, or assume the tone of abject servility, has too often the credit of possessing superior skill and science. And the patients, in the words of Byron, travestied—