of romance which lighted for a moment his solitary pursuit of the great purpose of his life.

Customers, wholesale and retail, have found their way to the new Warehouse for the sale of the privileged Oxford Bibles. Mr. Baskett, now the King's printer, has a powerful rival. To evade the royal patent, it will not be necessary for Thomas Guy to print his pocket Bible with foot-notes, which might be cut off when the volume was bound. He sits amongst his stores, musing, with more assurance than Alnaschar of his visions being realised, of the wealth that will flow in from his adroit treaty with the syndics of the Oxford Press. He will not demand the Lord Mayor's daughter in marriage, nor spurn her from him when she has accepted him as her lord. The passion for accumulation has got some possession of him; but if he should become rich, which he is firmly resolved to be, he will not waste his means in extravagant display, or the dissipation of some young men of the city, who ape the vices and follies of the courtiers. What if he should be able to do something towards the support of the hospital in Southwark, which seems to have fallen more and more into neglect and decay, since his boyish time when he has seen many a wretched creature carried within its gates. Sights of misery have been familiar to him during the course of his youth and manhood. He has seen the red cross on many a door during 1665, and has heard the awful midnight cry of "Bring out your dead." He has seen, after the plague has abated, what Mr. Pepys saw, "such begging of beggars." He has seen crowds of the houseless poor-sick, starving, with no

place of refuge—after the catastrophe of 1666. The great hospital of St. Bartholomew flourishes; but its rents, large as they may be, are insufficient to accomplish what was desired when it was founded anew by King Henry VIII., who was "moved thereto with great pity for and towards the relief and succour and help of the poor, aged, sick, lame, and impotent people," described as "lying and going about begging in the common streets of the city of London and suburbs of the same." With a strength of will rarely equalled in real life, he resolves to be rich, and to do some good with his riches.

But Thomas Guy, in coming to this resolution, has an arduous struggle with natural feelings. He is lonely. He has indulged himself with the cost of a female servant, who cooks his frugal meal, and keeps his Holland shirt tidy. But he wants the solace of a household friend. He goes little into society. He dines rarely in his Company's hall. The city dames, according to his observation, are too ambitious of finery. He has once or twice conversed during the banquet at Guildhall with the daughter of a rich stationer, and has found her deplorably ignorant of the commodities in which her father deals. Gradually he begins to think that his own maid-servant is quite as attractive as a citizen's daughter; born of honest parents, religiously disposed, and skilled in cookery and other useful arts. What if this neat-handed Phillis should become his wife! He is sure that he can compel her to regulate his affairs with due economy. She has never wasted money or victuals while in his service. She has professed that implicit obedience

to

to his will which he requires. He at last makes his proposal, and it is accepted graciously. But there is one danger which the handmaiden has not foreseen. She has not apprehended the possibility of giving dire offence by the slightest manifestation of her own opinion in opposition to that of her master. He has been very cross for several days. He has been fined once for neglecting to pave the footway in front of his shop. He delays to incur an expense which he thinks ought to fall upon the pavement commissioners; but he must yield. The paviors go work. He watches them narrowly. He has a groundplan of his own premises, the boundary of which is not very well defined in the frontage. He gives the most minute directions as to the exact point where his portion of the "flat or broad stone" way within the posts should begin and end. The workmen find that a very awkward space is left unpaved. They carry their remonstrances to the incautious maiden within doors, during the absence of her master. She little knows what she is doing when she says, "Do as you wish. Tell him I bade you, and I am sure he will not be angry." The poor girl must accept her destiny, to remain unmarried to the thriving bookseller. The romance of Thomas Guy's life is over. He girds up his loins for a struggle for a plum. But if I see his Shadow aright there is a soft place in his heart, where the memory of that ill-used woman will long abide.

Maitland, who eschews all romance, has not a word of this story, which I find in Nichols. After the relation of the fortunate contract with the University

of Oxford, he thus pursues, in his description of Guy's Hospital, his account of the man he terms "our founder." "Some time after, England being engaged in an expensive War against France, the poor Seamen on board the Royal Navy, for many years instead of Money received Tickets for their Pay, which those necessitous but very useful men were obliged to dispose of at thirty, forty, and sometimes fifty in the hundred discount. Mr. Guy, discovering the sweets of this traffic, became an early dealer therein." The "expensive war against France" acquires a more precise date in the hands of a writer in Mr. Nichols' 'Literary Anecdotes :' "The bulk of his fortune was acquired by purchasing seamen's tickets during Queen Anne's wars, and by South-Sea Stock in the memorable year 1720." The slightest acquaintance with English history will show that the practice of paying seamen by tickets belonged to the time of Charles II. "During Queen Anne's wars" no. minister would have dared to resort to such a financial expedient, which had been denounced even by the Parliament of the Restoration. Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Admiralty, has many notices in his Diary of this practice, which had nearly produced a mutiny in the Fleet. On the 28th September, 1667, he writes, "All the morning at the office, busy upon an Order of Council, wherein they are mightily at a loss what to advise about our discharging of seamen by ticket, there being no money to pay their wages before January." The Government had become alarmed in the previous June, when the English deserters on board the Dutch ships

were reported to say, "We did heretofore fight for tickets, now we fight for dollars ;" and when, in the streets of Wapping, the seamen's wives were crying up and down, "This comes of your not paying our husbands, and now your work is undone, or done by hands that understand it not." The 'Diary' of Pepys, from February to July 1668, is full of his anxieties about "the old business of tickets." But there were higher persons in alarm about the interference of Parliament with this practice. On the 14th of February he writes, "I do find the Duke of York himself troubled, and willing not to be troubled with occasions of having his name used among the Parliament; though he himself do declare that he did give directions to Lord Brouncker to discharge the men at Chatham by ticket, and will own it, if the House call for it, but not else." At this period. Thomas Guy was still an apprentice. When he entered upon his own little shop, with his capital of two hundred pounds, he had probably other uses for his ready money than to engage in an investment which was very likely to be altogether lost, in a general repudiation of State obligations. There are no distinct traces of the practice of paying seamen by tickets having been revived, even in the time of Charles II. Lord Macaulay indeed says, speaking of the state of the navy, upon the authority of a memorial by Pepys in 1684, "The sailors were paid with so little punctuality, that they were glad to find some usurer who would purchase their tickets at forty per cent. discount." This memorial of Pepys has never been printed; and Lord Macaulay ex

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