Budgell, Pope's barking enemy, destroyed himself after his losses in this South Sea scheme, and a well-known man of the day called "Tom of Ten Thousand" lost his reason.
Charles Lamb, in his "Elia," has described the South Sea House in his own delightful way. "Reader," says the poet clerk, "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 shy suburban retreat northerly—didst thou never observe a melancholy-looking, handsome brick and stone edifice, to the left, where Threadneedle Street abuts upon Bishopsgate? I dare say thou hast often admired its magnificent portals, ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters and pillars, with few or no traces of goers-in or comers-out—a desolation something like Balclutha's.[11] 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 has long since fled. Here are still to be seen stately porticoes; 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 committee rooms, with venerable faces of beadles, door-keepers; 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 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 conflagration; 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.
"Peace to the manes of the Bubble! Silence and destitution are upon thy walls, proud house, for a memorial! 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 cloistral, which is delightful! With what reverence have I paced thy great bare rooms and courts at eventide! They spake of the past; the shade of some dead accountant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, stiff as in life."
FOOTNOTES:
[11] "I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were desolate." (Ossian.)
CHAPTER XLVIII
CANNON STREET
London Stone and Jack Cade—Southwark Bridge—Old City Churches—The Salters' Company's Hall, and the Salters' Company's History—Oxford House—Salters' Banquets—Salters' Hall Chapel—A Mysterious Murder in Cannon Street—St. Martin Orgar—King William's Statue—Cannon Street Station.
Cannon Street was originally called Candlewick Street, from the candle-makers who lived there. It afterwards became a resort of drapers.