running cashes." The original Marygold (sometimes mistaken for a rising sun), with the motto, "Ainsi mon ame," gilt upon a green ground, elegantly designed in the French manner, is still to be seen in the bank "shop," and a marigold in full bloom still blossoms on the bank cheques. In the year 1678 it was at Mr. Blanchard's, the goldsmith's, next door to Temple Bar, that Dryden the poet, bruised and angry, deposited £50 as a reward for any one who would discover the bullies of Lord Rochester who had beaten him in Rose Alley for some scurrilous verses really written by the Earl of Dorset. The advertisement promises, if the discoverer be himself one of the actors, he shall still have the £50, without letting his name be known or receiving the least trouble by any prosecution. Black Will's cudgel was, after all, a clumsy way of making a repartee. In the course of the eighteenth century, the firm was joined by the descendants of Alderman Backwell, who had been nearly ruined by the iniquitous and arbitrary closing of the Exchequer in 1672 by order of Charles II., that needy and unprincipled king; but the worthy alderman lived to retrieve his position.
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In a quaint oak-paneiied room over Temple Bar the firm long preserved the dusty books of the unfortunate alderman, who fled to Holland. On the sallow leaves over which the poor alderman once groaned, you can read the items of our sale of Dunkirk to the French, the dishonourable surrender of which drove the nation almost to madness, and hastened the downfall of Lord Clarendon, who was supposed to have built a magnificent house (on the site of Albemarle Street, Piccadilly) with some of the very money. Charles II. himself banked here, and drew his thousands with all the careless nonchalance of his nature. Nell Gwynne, Pepys, of the "Diary," and Prince Rupert also had accounts at Child's, and some of these ledgers were hoarded over Temple Bar in that Venetian-looking room, approached by strange prison-like passages, for the rent of which chamber Messrs Child paid the City to the very last.
When Prince Rupert died at his house in the Barbican, the valuable jewels of the old cavalry soldier, valued at £20,000, were disposed of in a lottery, managed by Mr. Francis Child, the goldsmith; the king himself, who took a half-businesslike, half-boyish interest in the matter, counting the tickets among all the lords and ladies at Whitehall.
