- sina Schuylenberg, Princess von Eberstein, Duchess of Munster (1715), and
Duchess of Kendal (1729)—Hogarth engraved the High Dutch hussey's arms—the Countess of Platen, and her two nieces, and Lady Sunderland, with Craggs and Aislabie, got the major part of the fictitious stock of 574,000l. created by the company. The stock rose to thirteen hundred and fifty pounds premium! Beggars on horseback tore through the streets. There were S. S. coaches with Auri sacra fames painted on the panels. Hundreds of companies were projected, and "took the town" immensely. Steele's (Sir Richard's) Fishpool Company, for bringing the finny denizens of the deep by sea to London—Puckle's Defence Gun—the Bottomree, the Coral-fishery, the Wreck-fishing companies, were highly spoken of. Stogden's remittances created great excitement in the market. There were companies for insurance against bad servants, against thefts and robberies, against fire and shipwreck. There were companies for importing jack-asses from Spain (coals to Newcastle!); for trading in human hair (started by a clergyman); for fattening pigs; for making pantiles, Joppa and Castile soap; for manufacturing lutestring; "for the wheel of a perpetual motion;" and for extracting stearine from sunflower-seed. There were Dutch bubbles, and oil bubbles, and water bubbles—bubbles of timber, and bubbles of glass. There were the "sail cloth," or "Globe permits"—mere cards with the seal of the "Globe" tavern impressed on them, and "permitting" the fortunate holders to acquire shares at some indefinite period in some misty sailcloth factory. These sold for sixty guineas a piece. There was Jezreel Jones's trade to Barbary, too, for which the permits could not be sold fast enough. Welsh copper and York Buildings' shares rose to cent. per cent. premium. Sir John Blunt, the scrivener, rose from a mean estate to prodigious wealth, prospered, and "whale directors ate up all." There was an S. S. literature—an S. S. anthology.
"Meantime, secure on Garrway's cliffs, A savage race, by shipwreck fed, Lie waiting for the founder'd skiffs, And strip the bodies of the dead."
Pshaw! have we not Mr. Ward's capital picture in the Vernon collection, and hundreds of pamphlets on S. S. in the British Museum? The end came, and was, of course, irrevocable and immortal smash. Ithuriel's spear, in the shape of a scire facias in the London Gazette, pierced this foully iridescent bubble through and through, producing precisely the same effect as the publication of Mr. Sparkman's inexorable railway statistics in a supplement to The Times newspaper, A.D. 1845. The city woke up one morning and found itself ruined. The Sword-blade company went bankrupt. Knight, the S.S. cashier, fled, but was captured at Tirlemont in Flanders, at the instance of the British resident in Brussels, and thrown into the citadel of Antwerp, from which he presently managed to escape. In an age when almost every one had committed more or less heinous acts of roguery, great sympathy was evinced for rogues. At home, however, there were some thoughts of vengeance. Honest men
