Essays of Elia

Essays of Elia

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 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.

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 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.--

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 day-books, have rested from their depredations, but other light

generations 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 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!

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

Casting a preparatory glance at the bottom of this article--as the

wary connoisseur in prints, with cursory eye (which, while it reads,

seems as though it read not,) never fails to consult the _quis

sculpsit_ in the corner, 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.

Well, I do agnize something of the sort. I confess that it is my

humour, my fancy--in the forepart 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 increased appetite

to your books ***** 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 cyphers, frisks and curvets so at its

ease over the flowery carpet-ground of a midnight dissertation.--It

feels its promotion. ***** So that you see, upon the whole, the

literary dignity of _Elia_ is very little, if at all, compromised in

the condescension.

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--

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 _Baskett_ Prayer Book. There hung Peter in his uneasy

posture--holy Bartlemy in the troublesome act of flaying, after the

famous Marsyas by Spagnoletti.--I honoured them all, and could almost

have wept the defalcation of Iscariot--so much did we 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.

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 saint's-day falls out next week, or the

week after. Peradventure the Epiphany, by some periodical infelicity,

would, once in six years, merge in a Sabbath. Now am I little better

than one of the profane. Let me not be thought to arraign the wisdom

of my civil superiors, who have judged the further observation of

these holy tides to be papistical, superstitious.

Only in a custom of such long standing, methinks, if their Holinesses

the Bishops had, in decency, been first sounded--but I am wading out