The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 | Page 3

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!
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 spoke of the past:--the
shade of some dead accountant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by
me, stiff as in life. Living accounts and accountants puzzle me. I have
no skill in figuring. But thy great dead tomes, which scarce three
degenerate clerks of the present day could lift from their enshrining
shelves--with their old fantastic flourishes, and decorative rubric
interlacings--their sums in triple columniations, set down with formal
superfluity of cyphers--with pious sentences at the beginning, without
which our religious ancestors never ventured to 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 can look upon these defunct
dragons with complacency. Thy heavy odd-shaped ivory-handled
penknives (our ancestors had every thing on a larger scale than we have
hearts for) are as good as any thing from Herculaneum. The
pounce-boxes of our days have gone retrograde.
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 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. 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 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 Cambro-Briton. He had
something of the choleric complexion of his countrymen 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,
Maccaronies. He was the last of that race of beaux. Melancholy as a
gib-cat over his counter all the forenoon, I think I see him, making up
his cash (as they call it) with tremulous fingers, as if he feared every
one about him was a defaulter; in his hypochondry ready to imagine
himself one; haunted, at least, with the idea of the possibility of his
becoming one: his tristful visage clearing up a little over his roast neck
of veal at Anderton's 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-known rap at the door
with the stroke of the clock announcing six, was a topic of never-failing
mirth in the families which this dear old bachelor gladdened with his
presence. Then was his forte, his glorified hour! How would he chirp,
and expand, over a muffin! How would he dilate into secret history!
His countryman, Pennant himself, in particular, could not be more
eloquent than he in relation to old and new London--the site of old
theatres, churches, streets gone to 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 immortalized 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,