III. IV. V. VI. VII. 352 352 353 353 354 ΤΟ MARTIN CHARLES BURNEY. FORGIVE ME, BURNEY, if to thee these late Thy self no common judge of books and men, Those numerous clouds that flit o'er brightest days, 1 have not found a whiter soul than thine. THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. 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 suburban retreat northerly--didst thou never observe a melancholylooking, 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 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, doorkeepers-directors seated in form on solemn days (to proclaim a dead dividend) at long wormeaten 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 subgovernors, of Queen Anne, and the first two 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 I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were desolate.-OSSIAN |