reappear as Phineas Quiddy, merchant (and, of course, Esquire) of Mark-lane, Fenchurch-street

CHAP. XIX.

A SHORT CHAPTER WHICH, TREATING WITH PROFOUND PHILOSOPHY OF THE CHARACTER AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE QUIDDEIAN SYSTEM OF TRADE, INVITES THE READER'S EARNEST ATTENTION.

THREE years have elapsed, and behold our "Merchant" at the age of thirty, possessed of just so many thousands of pounds.

We will not hypercritically inquire whether Mr. Quiddy was justified by the nature of his dealings in assuming the style of "merchant:" whether that term in its true, old-English, honest, honourable, and let us add, dignified sense, could be fairly applied to him; whether, indeed, it was not degraded by such application. But how, otherwise, could he be properly described? He was not a silk-mercer, and nothing more; he was not a leather-seller, and nothing more; nor a laceman merely, nor a linendraper, nor a hosier, nor an India-warehouseman, nor a Coventry-warehouseman, nor a Nottingham warehouseman, nor simply a dealer in hats, or gloves, or shoes, or-in short, he was not one, but Legion; and to have described himself by all the various and multifarious branches of his business would have been troublesome and inconvenient. Some comprehensive term, therefore, that would embrace all, or most of, the branches of his business was requisite. We could have suggested one, and that perhaps the true one-haberdasher; but applied to a man already of thirty thousand pounds, and with the prospect clear before him of multiplying those by ten, it would have been, to say the least of it, ungenteel. Weil; except in so far as it regards the integrity of the English language, and the injury done to it by a habit of calling things by wrong names, it does not much signify: so, since merchant he styled himself, why, merchant let him be.

"The great man in Mark-lane," as Mr. Quiddy was now commonly called by the small tradesmen in his neighbourhood, had, ever since his arrival there, been to them a subject both of wonder and alarm. Though their profits had not been large, they, for the greater part, had hitherto contrived to maintain themselves and their families respectably and in comfort; but small as were their gains, they now found that, in their several ways, not only were they undersold by Quiddy, but that in many cases he charged less for his wares than they must have cost the manufacturer.

Now, the tie that binds the purchaser to the shopkeeper is seldom of so refined or disinterested a kind as to induce the former to pay him a shilling for a commodity if he can purchase it of any other for the twentieth part of a farthing less; and the power of that tie, small as it is, diminishes in proportion as the advantages offered by that other increase. The consequence of this pitiable, but common, infirmity was, that gradually the oldest and best customers of those small tradesmen abandoned their shops for the Emporium of Quiddy, leaving them and Ruin to stare each other in the face. Still they went on wondering how it was that the great man could continue so materially to undersell them (knowing how small were their own profits) and yet manage to keep, as they expressed it, his head above water.

"Wonder," says Johnson, "is the effect of novelty upon ignorance;" nor was it till they were enlightened by a practical illustration of the causes of that startling phenomenon that their wonder ceased. This explanation, sooner or later, the greater number of them received.

Our profound and extensive acquaintance with mankind has led us to the discovery of what we consider to be a fixed and immutable principle in human nature; and since we do not recollect it to have been ever before publicly propounded, and in set form, by any other philosopher, dead or alive, our vanity may be excusable if we claim some credit for its originality. It is nothing less than this: No man likes to be ruined, and would not be if he could help it. Now, operated on by this principle, those minor tradesmen when they saw ruin approaching, took measures to avert it. Those measures were of greater or of less wisdom according to the quantity of that material which they severally possessed; but, generally with them, temporizing-fighting against time--was the rule of conduct.

Venturing a bold comparison, we will say that an English man of business is, individually, at the least, as tender of his credit as the Americans, as a nation, show themselves to be of theirs; and he will sacrifice all, to the very last, in order to maintain it. When, therefore, either through his own mismanagement, or owing to adverse circumstances, he finds himself in difficulties, he will struggle on in the hope, however slender of overcoming them, rather than expose his condition to the world -and every one has a little world of his own-till, in the end, bad has become worse. Whether this be the wise course of proceeding is therefore more than doubtful; but it is almost invariably the case with an embarrassed man, of any rank or class, and more especially if he be also an honourable and a sensitive man, that he will continue the secret and souldepressing struggle, hoping, and still hoping that something, however unlikely to occur in the common course of things, may present itself in his individual case to extricate him. After all, in a country essentially commercial like England, where credit is the mainspring of commerce; where the very life-blood of credit is punctuality of payment; and where failure in this latter respect involves loss of credit, and probable ruin; it is not much a matter of astonishment that men in business should sometimes have recourse to expedients and contrivances (questionable though they be) to prolong that credit upon which little short of their existence depends-for, as we have before said, no man likes to be ruined.

It has been recommended to those who find Time heavy on hand, to imp his wings with a promissory note, for which they foresee a very reasonable chance of their being unprovided at the expiration of its term by this means the progress of the old gentleman is said to be accelerated amazingly. And so was it found to be by our small tradesmen. Ere the establishment of the all-grasping, all-devouring Quiddy in their neighbourhood had, by diminishing their business, reduced their gains, they could look forward unflinchingly to pay-day: since that untoward event, the two, three, or six months' date of their " 'promise to pay" seemed to be contracted to a span; and Time, instead of approaching as heretofore, at a sober, gentlemanlike pace, appeared to hurry towards them with a fifty-lamplighter power of speed. The period was a season of terror to them-of anxious days and sleepless

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nights. Still were they doggedly bent upon not being ruined-if they could help it so, to meet their approaching and pressing engagements, and thereby uphold their credit a little and a little longer, in the delusive hope that things would take a favourable turn," they were compelled to sell their commodities, in sufficient quantities, for considerably less than it had cost to produce them; and Quiddy was always a sure and ready-money purchaser. And thus, one by one, were they enlightened by a practical solution of the great Quiddian riddle which had for so long a time baffled their conjectures: and thus did Quiddy, the Monster-Haberdasher of his day, swallow up all the small fry of haberdashery that came within his reach.

Now it is entirely away from our intention to amuse ourselves, and at the same time stupify the reader, by perpetrating a treatise on a branch of political economy; but we will ask one question :

"Is the Quiddeian system of trade as it has here been explained—or, to speak out and speak truly, exposed-a wholesome system?" Answer-by a Quiddeian :

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Certainly it is. For although it is ruining and gradually sweeping away a large and respectable class of people, the industrious and contented shopkeepers of small capital, it serves to aggrandize and bloat with wealth, eight, ten, or a dozen, of us meritorious Quiddys: ergo, the system is a wholesome system."

"But one more question:-Does not the system occasionally offer facilities to frauds upon the manufac-?"

"Hush! I have told you that the system is beneficial to the Quiddys, and that answer ought to satisfy any reasonable inquirer.” "We are satisfied."

We think it not inexpedient in this place to recal attention to the words which occur just at the opening of our first chapter :

"Nothing is a term sufficiently intelligible were it otherwise, there be thousands who could explain it, with Johnsonian precision, by simply turning their pockets inside out. But we apprehend that Sheer Industry is not of so definite a signification, and that (at least in the cases we have mentioned) it must mean industry-and something more. As to what that something more may be, we may perhaps be somewhat enlightened by using the career of Phineas Quiddy as our lexicon."

To this end we have hitherto traced with some minuteness the progress of our hero, and in the same manner explained the means whereby he had converted his nothing into thirty good, substantial thousands of pounds. Having shown how the scrubby, selfish, lowminded, and low-principled shopboy had accomplished this wondrous transmutation, we might here take our leave of him: for since it is (to say the least of it) as obvious that " money will make money," as how from nothing may be made something; it may without further explanation be understood how Quiddy, with so broad a foundation of wealth to build upon, should have gone easily on, piling thousand upon thousand, until he had become one of the wealthiest men in the city. Unless, therefore, any circumstance worthy of particular notice should occur, we shall return to him no more in his money-manufactory, but just glance at his conduct in the new position to which wealth has entitled him to aspire.

P*.

RECOLLECTIONS OF ETON..

BY AN ETONIAN.

СНАР. І.

Rosalind.-A traveller! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad; I fear you have sold your own lands, to see other men's; often to have seen much, and to have nothing, is to have rich eyes and poor hands.

Jaques.-Yes, I have gained experience.

-or,

AS YOU LIKEe it.

CONSIDERING that many of my predecessors in arte scribendi, in plain English, the art of scribbling- have usually thought proper to say something of themselves, as the proem of the quid sequitur, I propose to follow in the same beaten track. Newton, Milton, the Bard of Avon, all the worthies of olden times, nay, those exalted characters who have taken an airy flight from this world at Tyburn-tree and the more modern Golgotha, the Old Bailey, have all been celebrated by their biographers. My intention is, not to wait for posthumous fame, but to blow my own trumpet.

For the information then of those who honour these pages with a perusal, I shall briefly state my parentage; which though not encircled with the splendour of a coronet, and those flattering distinctions which the world generally attaches to the scions of nobility-though no eagle hovered over my cradle to augur future greatness-though no prophet foretold my exaltation to a prebendal stall, or some snug living (for I fear he would have been a lying prophet), still was my birth, as far as worldly consideration goes, somewhat above that of the common herd of mankind.

My father was a Proctor of Doctors' Commons, and was the lineal descendant of the renowned admiral,* who sooner than lead a life of inactivity when his country's battles were to be fought, entered into the service of the usurper Cromwell, and, as is well known, conquered Van Tromp in the celebrated engagement, in which the arrogant Dutchman lost his life.

My name it is needless to mention, for whatever Englishman knows it not by this time, must be little versed in the history of his native land. His father had been what in those days was termed, a squire of high degree (a character almost out of date in these degenerate days), and was possessed of considerable property

An anecdote is extant among many others respecting him. When be obtained the command of the English fleet, he procured the command of a ship of war for one of his brothers, imagining that he had as much courage as himself; but in the first action, his brother deceived him, by showing the greatest cowardice, and keeping cut of the reach of cannon-shot. He immediately sent him to England.

“I have deceived myself," said be to his officers; "my brother is not made for war: but if he cannot show face to the enemy on board a ship, he can at least be useful to his country at the tail of a plough."

He intrusted him with the cultivation of his estates, and left them to him when he died.

in Yorkshire: he was, moreover, the lord of two manors, near to Wallingford, in Berkshire; but from a system of great extrava gance in his hunting and canine establishment, was compelled to dispose of the greater part of his broad acres, and in the general wreck (by persuading my father to join in cutting off the entail) the two manors had wings and flew away. The same unfortunate mania for spending money was inherited by my father, and again by his son, too truly verifying the old adage, "What is in the bone"-and from what I can understand, at the time of his marriage with my mother, he had scarcely anything else but his business as a Proctor; but that, owing to the few who then followed the profession, was attended with great emoluments, and united to that of his matrimonial dowery, enabled him to live in tolerable affluence.

The beautiful village of Upton in Buckinghamshire, situated somewhat more than a mile distant from our great storehouse of education-Eton College, the great school, the protégé of royalty -was the place of my nativity in the year 1791; my father renting a very pretty cottage ornée in the above retired village, where he might have said, in addition to the house, with Horace,

Modus agri non ita magnus;

Hortus ubi, et tecto vicinus jugis aquæ fons,

Et paulum silvæ super his fuit.

An event of such importance occurring to the community at large, it was necessary that something remarkable should take place, which was nothing more nor less than the loss of the coachman's hat, in the urgency of his haste on one of the carriagehorses, to procure the attendance of the medical adviser of the family-Dr. Macqueen of Eton; as well as that of another circumstance which befel my most excellent father, in making the experiment of a nearer way than that of the common footpath, finding himself immersed nearly to his chin in one of the ditches which intervene between Upton and Eton. With these two untoward events, symbolical perhaps of those which have already overflown the writer of these lines, the birth of him who was to prolong the old admiral's race took place, and he has done it effectually.

The years of infancy passed off like those of most children, during which time I sustained the greatest loss which can befal a child, that of a beloved mother, and soon succeeded by the decease of an only brother, who was named after his ancestor. When I was considered of sufficient age to have Latin and Greek flogged into me, I was sent to the neighbouring village of Slough, to the especial care of a Mr. A——, or I might say with greater propriety, that of Mrs. A (as I went as a sansculotte), to undergo the drudgery as well to tutor as to pupil, of learning my A B C : from thence I removed with him to Langley Broom-no inappropriate name for its owner, who wielded the birch with a most powerful arm. If