THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE
READER, 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 view 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, i