VIII. Thomas Guy (1644-1724)

In Horsleydown, near the eastern end of Tooley Street, which was then what its name implies, a down for horses to graze in, near to the southern bank of the Thames, and just opposite to the Tower of London, Thomas Guy was born in 1644, three years after Dudley North. His long life, however, carries us into a generation later than North's, and into a region of commerce very different from that in which North made himself famous.

His father was a lighterman and coal-dealer, who carried on a humble but respectable trade in the district specially appropriated to small shipping and to traffic in coal, which was just then beginning to be brought in considerable quantities from Newcastle and its neighbourhood, to take the place of the wood, which had hitherto been almost the only fuel in use among Englishmen. So great had been the prejudice against Newcastle coal in former times, that, during the reign of Edward I., one man was hanged for daring to burn it within the walls of London.

Thomas Guy lost his father when he was eight years old. But his mother, a native of Tamworth, was a good and clever woman, determined to help her children on in the world. She carefully trained them herself, and gave them the best schooling that could be had. Little Thomas played upon the open fields, which then stretched along the banks of the river up to London Bridge, and took heartily to his lessons, showing an especial fondness for books. That fondness may have led his mother to apprentice him for eight years, in 1660, to a bookseller named John Clarke, whose shop was in the porch of Mercer's Chapel, in Cheapside.

Guy was then sixteen years old. He served his time, and became a member of the Stationers' Company. But before the time was up, on the morning of the 2d of September 1666, he was called out to see the most wonderful sight and the most terrible calamity that ever happened in London. At a baker's shop in Pudding Lane, on Fish Street Hill, at the spot now marked by the Monument, a fire broke out Most of the houses being of wood, and there being no fire-engines or other efficient means of staying it, the fire was driven by a sharp wind, north, south, and west, as far as Pye Comer, in Smithfield, People afterwards made fun of the fire which began at a baker's shop in Pudding Lane and spread to Pye Comer. But the Great Fire was no matter for a joke. Through four long days and nights it grew and raged, darkening the sun, and, with its lurid glare, making night as bright as day.

"The sky," says John Evelyn, who watched it, "was like the top of a burning oven, visible for forty miles round, to which distance the smoke extended. The crackling of the flames, the shrieking of the women and children, the fall of towers, houses, and churches, was like a hideous storm, and the air about so hot and inflamed, that at last no one could approach it. The stones flew like grenadoes, and the melting lead ran down the street in a stream, and the very pavement glowed with fiery redness."

Sir Thomas Gresham's Exchange, the old Guildhall, the venerable cathedral of St Paul's, considered the noblest in Christendom, were destroyed, along with eighty-nine churches, and more than thirteen thousand houses in four hundred streets. Of the whole district within the city walls, four hundred and thirty-six acres were in ruins, and only seventy-five acres were left covered Property worth £10,000,000—a vast sum, indeed, for the smaller and poorer London of those days—was wasted, and thousands of starving Londoners had to run for their lives, and crouch for days and weeks on the bare fields of Islington and Hampstead, Southwark and Lambeth. "Oh, the miserable and calamitous spectacle!" exclaimed Evelyn; "such as haply the world had not seen the like since the foundation of it, nor to be outdone till the universal conflagration of it!"

Some good sprang, however, from the evil. The Great Plague of 1665, which began the year before, and continued during the following year, and which killed nearly seventy thousand people in London and its neighbourhood, was burnt out by the Great Fire of 1666. And the narrow streets and clumsy houses of old London were soon replaced by broader thoroughfares and better buildings.

Thomas Guy and his master were, of course, burnt out of their little shop in the porch of Mercer's Chapel. The master seems to have been ruined; but Guy, being only a shopman, suffered no serious injury. In 1668, having served his apprenticeship, and being twenty-four years old, he started in business for himself, with a capital of £200, in a new shop built on the sharp corner formed by Comhill and Lombard Street, looking out upon the whole length of the Poultry and Cheapside, on both sides of which more commodious, though less picturesque, houses were being set up, with the second Royal Exchange, now in progress of building, on his right, and a little to his left a pretty fruit and flower market, with trees growing up among its sheds, which had formerly been a meat-market, on the site now occupied by the Mansion-house.

There he prospered in his work, a clear notion of which we may derive from Mr Charles Knight's words.

"Placed thus," he says, "in the very heart of the great commercial operations of London, I can see the shadow of the young bookseller as he sits in his shop amidst his small stock, restless at the want of occupation, and envying the great merchant-adventurers congregating in the Exchange. He spreads his new books and his old upon a board in front of his window, now and then soliciting the busy trader who glances at them to buy Mr Wingate's 'Arithmetic made Easy,' or Mr Record's 'Grounds of Art,' or Mr Hawse's 'Short Arithmetic,' or, 'The Old and Tedious Way of Numbering reduced to a New and Brief Method.' He had divinity books, too, chiefly by the famous controversialists who wrote against any approach to the errors of the Church of Rome; and some by their opponents, who were equally hostile to the doctrines of the Nonconforming clergy. Theology was by far the most exciting topic of those days. Mr Guy was a good Protestant; and, as he sat in his shop, too often unvisited by customers, he meditated frequently upon the large trade that he could command if it were in his power to offer godly people Bibles well printed and cheap. There was no such commodity to be had in England. All the arts associated with the production of books were hampered with privileges and restrictions, and were consequently in a state very inferior to those practised in some countries abroad under conditions of freedom."

This was the case with all books, but most of all with Bibles. The privilege of printing Bibles was allowed only to the King's Printer and Oxford University. But the University Press was idle; and the office of King's Printer being continued in one careless family for more than a century, the printing of the volumes had come to be so "very bad, both in letter and paper," that they were hardly legible, and full of gross blunders. One important text was, in the Bible of 1653, printed,

"Know ye not that the unrighteous" (instead of "righteous,") "shall inherit the kingdom of God." "Fie! for shame I" exclaimed old Fuller, with good reason. "Considering with myself the causes of the growth and increase of impiety and profaneness in our land, amongst others this seemeth to me not the least,—the late many false and erroneous impressions of the Bible. Now know, what is but carelessness in other books, is impiety in setting forth of the Bible."

As a good Christian and a shrewd tradesman, Thomas Guy resolved to provide better and cheaper Bibles for his countrymen; and, in so doing, he set an example which several other enterprising booksellers of his day were quick in following. He employed an agent in Holland, who bought for him good paper and fine types, and entrusted them to competent Dutch printers, who had not yet lost the fame of superiority in the art which Caxton had learned from their forefathers and introduced into England two hundred years before. In this way capital Bibles were produced and sent over to Guy, who was able to sell great numbers of them at a low price, and yet with good profit to himself. But he had to smuggle them into England, and to be punished for so doing.

"This trade," says the old historian, "proving not only very detrimental to the public revenue, but likewise to the King's Printer, all ways and means were devised to quash the same, which being vigorously put in execution, the booksellers, by frequent seizures and prosecutions, became so great sufferers, that they judged a further pursuit thereof inconsistent with their interest."

Thomas Guy, shrewder and more prosperous than the rest, did not so judge. But he bethought him of a better way of carrying on his well-meant enterprise. The University of Oxford, being privileged to print Bibles, though it did not make much use of its privilege, was, after much persuasion from Guy, induced to farm its monopoly to him. He thereupon bought a good supply of types in Holland, brought them and a number of printers to London, and started a busy little printing-office in his shop at the corner of Lombard Street. There he began to make his fortune, and to do good service to religion and literature, by issuing great numbers of cheap Bibles in the name of the Oxford University.

He was a frugal man; and his enemies, jealous of the prosperity which he was honourably attaining, called him a miser. They remembered the time when, in the first year of his shopkeeping, he lived a bachelor, himself doing the whole household work, which he could not afford to keep a servant to do for him, and when he ordered his dinner from a neighbouring cookshop and ate it at his counter, with a sheet of paper for his only tablecloth. There was nothing dishonourable in that The dishonour would have been in following the gay fashion of the City gallants of his day, who rivalled the Court gallants of Charles II.'s time in extravagance, and incurring expenses beyond his means. Yet the foolish contempt which he won thereby has stuck to him ever since, and he is still often known as "Thomas Guy, the miser."

That he was always a very strict and prudent man, however—perhaps with rather a hard covering to the deep charity that was in his heart—is clear. In illustration of this, let us again turn to Mr Charles Knight for a picture of him when he was beginning to be rich.

"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 nor victuals while in his service. She has professed that implicit obedience to his will which he requires. He at last makes his proposal, and 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 to work. He watches them narrowly. He has a ground-plan 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 stoneway 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."

Yet he was to take a prominent part in the most romantic episode in the whole history of English commerce. The chief cause of this, though indirectly, while he was the direct cause in a great measure of the future prosperity of England, was another self-made, but a very different man, contemporary with Thomas Guy. The man was William Paterson, the founder of the Bank of England.

William Paterson, a native of Dumfries, was born in April 1658. He came to London, and became a member of the Merchant Tailors' Company in 1681, but the few years following that date were passed by him in America and the West Indies. He was in London again in 1686, and from that time he took up his position as an influential, though not as a very prosperous, merchant. He is chiefly famous for his ill-fated effort to establish a Scottish colony in the Isthmus of Darien. In two other favourite projects he was more successful. He was through a great many years a zealous advocate of the Union of England and Scotland, which had come to be under one sovereign since the time of James I., under a single form of government; and the adoption of that excellent benefit was mainly the result of his labours. His other project was strictly commercial. Soon after the accession of William and Mary, if not before, he began to urge the establishment of a National Bank of England, akin to the public banks already set up in Venice and elsewhere. Through three years he steadily recommended this enterprise against the fierce opposition of private and public enemies to it. At length, in the summer of 1694, the Bank of England wa started, meeting first in the new Mercers' Hall, built in place of the old building in the outskirts of which Guy had passed his 'prentice days as a bookseller. Afterwards, until the growth of the business made it necessary for a separate building to be set up, the Bank had a larger and more permanent dwelling-place in the Grocers' Hall, where Addison once saw fifty-four clerks at work in one long room. "I looked," he says, "into the great hall, where the bank is kept; and was not a little pleased to see the directors, secretaries, and clerks, with all the other members of that wealthy corporation, ranged in their several stations, according to the parts which they hold in that just and regular economy."

WILLIAM PATTERSON.

The establishment of the Bank of England was of immense benefit to commerce and society. The first bankers, from the times of Whittington to those of Herrick and his successors, were, in their capacity of bankers, little more than pawnbrokers. When kings, nobles, and others wanted money, they brought their jewels, title-deeds, and the like, to those who had gold to lend, and left them as security for whatever they borrowed. Whether the pledge was given in paper or in solid money's worth, bills, and every other sort of paper currency, as we now understand the terms, were for a long time unknown or unused. Until the money was repaid, the security was locked up, and not allowed to come into the market. By this plan of tying up great quantities of capital, the mercantile community was seriously damaged, although one class—especially since the days of George Heriot and Sir William Herrick—the class of goldsmiths, was greatly enriched and advanced in influence.

In attempting to remedy this evil, the London merchants fell into another as great. The extravagances of life under the gay rule of the Stuarts, and the risk which private individuals felt in keeping money in their own hands during the troublesome times both of the Rebellion and of the Restoration, brought immense quantities of coin and bullion into the keeping of the goldsmiths and other rich men of Lombard Street and its neighbourhood. Having begun as mere money-lenders, they came to be money-keepers as well. They not only lent great sums of money in return for paper bonds, but they also took charge of vast quantities of wealth, for which, in like manner, they issued paper bonds. Thus it became natural and necessary for the paper to be used as money; and no sooner was the custom begun than its convenience, both to the honest and to the dishonest, led to its adoption to an unreasonable and dangerous extent Half the gold in the kingdom came to be stowed away in the goldsmiths' vaults, and the buying and selling of ordinary merchants and tradesmen was carried on almost exclusively by mea ns of paper.

Both for giving and for receiving bullion the bankers or money-agents charged high rates of interest, and so enriched themselves to the disparagement of their neighhours; and the public, while paying dearly for these privileges, ran the risk of losing their wealth through the failure or defalcation of the men to whom they entrusted it. When Sir Dudley North came home from Constantinople, we are told, he was greatly astonished at the new and irregular banking customs which had been introduced during his absence. For a long time he refused to lodge his money in the goldsmiths' hands, preferring to have "his own cash-keeper" in his own counting-house, "as merchants used to do." "His friends," it is added, "wondered at this, as if he did not know his own interest." At last he, too, found it necessary to follow the fashion. "In the latter end of his time, when he dealt more in trusts and mortgages than in merchandise, he saw a better custom, and used the shop of Sir Francis Child, at Temple Bar, for paying and receiving all his great sums."

Sir Francis Child the first regular private banker, "the father of his profession," was a safe guardian of the money entrusted to him; and so were many of his rivals and contemporaries. But many of the new sort of bankers were by no means safe, and much risk was incurred by those who entrusted their wealth to them. It was to remedy or improve upon this state of things that the Bank of England was started, at William Paterson's suggestion, in 1694, and it was wonderfully successful. It became, not only the bank of the State, serving as the depositary of the public revenues, but also the centre of all the vast financial machinery which has since been developed for the convenience and profit of merchants, and all who share in their prosperity. At its foundation it received power to deal in bills of exchange, bullion, and public and private bonds, and, in lieu of the old irregular and cumbrous securities which were given by the private bankers, to issue bank-notes, which could be passed from hand to hand as easily as gold and silver, and converted at any time into actual coin.

Being established just at the dawn of those fortunate times which were come for England by the great Rebellion, and the setting up of William III. in place of James II., it greatly helped the extension of that regenerated commerce which Addison described so vividly in 1711.

"If we consider our own country in its natural prospect," he wrote, "without any of the benefits and advantages of commerce, what an uncomfortable spot of earth falls to our share! Natural historians tell us that no fruit grows originally among us, besides hips and haws, acorns and pignuts, with other delicacies of the like nature; that our climate of itself, and without the assistance of art, can make no further advances towards a plum than a sloe, and carries an apple to no greater perfection than a crab; that our melons, our peaches, our figs, our apricots, and cherries are strangers among us, imported in different ages, and naturalised in our English gardens; and that they would all degenerate and fall away into the taste of our country, if they were wholly neglected by the planter and left to the mercy of our sun and soil. Nor has traffic more enriched our vegetable world than it has improved the whole face of nature among us. Our ships are laden with the harvest of every climate; our tables are stored with spices and oils and wines; our rooms are filled with pyramids of china and adorned with workmanship of Japan; our morning's draught comes from the remotest corners of the earth; we repair our bodies by the drugs of America, and repose ourselves under Indian canopies. The vineyards of France are our gardens, the Spice Islands our hotbeds; the Persians are our weavers, and the Chinese our potters. Nature indeed furnishes us with the bare necessities of life; but traffic gives us a great variety of what is useful, and at the same time supplies us with everything that is convenient and ornamental. For these reasons there are not more useful members in a commonwealth than merchants. They knit man Second Royal Exchangekind together in a mutual intercourse of good ofHces, distribute the gifts of nature, find work for the poor, add wealth to the rich, and magnificence to the great. Our English merchant converts the tin of his own country into gold, and exchanges his wool for rubies. The Mahometans are clothed in our British manufacture, and the inhabitants of the frozen zone are warmed with the fleeces of our sheep. When I have been upon 'Change, I have often fancied one of our old kings standing in person where he is represented in effigy, and looking down upon the wealthy concourse of people with which that place is every day filled. In this case how would he be surprised to hear all the languages of Europe spoken in this little spot of his former dominions, and to see so many private men, who, in his time, would have been the vassals of some powerful baron, negotiating like princes for greater sums of money than were formerly to be met with in the royal treasury! Trade, without enlarging the British territories, has given us a kind of additional empire. It has multiplied the number of the rich, made our landed estates infinitely more valuable than they were formerly, and added to them an accession of other estates as valuable as the lands themselves."

SECOND ROYAL EXCHANGE.

In helping to establish that noble empire of trade, which is now twenty times as extensive and powerful as it was in Addison's day, the Bank of England also gave accidental encouragement to a new branch of trade which for the most part was very mischievous. The new impetus in lawful money-making gave birth to all sorts of more or less unlawful money-making.

"Some of them." according to a contemporary authority, "were very useful and successful whilst they continued in a few hands, till they fell into stock-jobbing, now much introduced, when they dwindled into nothing* Others of them, and these the greater number, were mere whims, of little or no service to the world. Moreover, projects, as usual, begat projects; lottery upon lottery, engine upon engine, etc., multiplied wonderfully. If it happened that any one person got considerably by a happy and useful invention, the consequence generally was that others followed the track, in spite of the patent; thus going on to jostle out one another, and to abuse the credulity of the people."

"London at this time," says another historian, of the year 1698, "abounded with many new projects and schemes promising mountains of gold; the Royal Exchange was crowded with projects, wagers, airy companies of new manufactures and inventions, and stock-jobbers and the like."

In that year, indeed, stock-jobbing became so extensive a business that it had to find a separate home in 'Change Alley. The business advanced each year, in spite of the angry but well-merited denunciation of it in Parliament and the pulpit, in learned treatises and vigorous pamphlets without number.

"It is a complete system of knavery," we read in one work, "founded in fraud, born of deceit, and nourished by trickeries, forgeries, falsehoods, and all sorts of delusions coining false news whispering imaginary terrors, and preying upon those they have elevated and depressed."

"The stock-jobbers," says another, "can ruin men silently; they undermine and impoverish them, and fiddle them out of their money by the strange, unheard-of engines of interest, discount, transfers, tallies, debentures, shares, projects, and the devil-and-all of figures and hard names."

"The poor English," writes a third, "run a-madding after new inventions, whims, and projects; and this ingredient my dear countrymen have—they are violent, and prosecute their projects eagerly."

When all business was regarded as a game of chance, in which the professed money-makers played with loaded dice, it is not strange that senseless speculations of all sorts should be wildly entered upon.

"Several evil-disposed persons," it was averred in an Act of Parliament passed in 1698, "for divers years last past have set up many mischievous and unlawful games, called lotteries, not only in the cities of London and Westminster, and in the suburbs thereof and places adjoining, but in most of the eminent towns and places in England and Wales, and have thereby most unjustly and fraudulently got to themselves great sums of money from the children and servants of several gentlemen, traders, and merchants, and from other unwary persons, to the utter ruin and impoverishment of many families, and to the reproach of the English laws and government"

But before long the English Government itself proceeded to organise the most gigantic lottery ever known. In 1711, the Earl of Oxford, who was Lord Treasurer, finding the State burdened with £10,000,000 worth of debts and deficiencies, hit upon a wonderful expedient for tiding over the difficulty. He saw that people's heads were turned by the exaggerated talk of buccaneers and other roving adventurers respecting the boundless wealth to be obtained by search and settlement in the seas and coast-land of South America. Therefore he procured an Act of Parliament appointing that, "to the intent that the trade to the South Seas be carried on for the honour and increase of the wealth and riches of this realm," a company should be formed, having for its members all those to whom the State was indebted, with the exclusive privilege of trading, colonising, and fighting in the southern seas from Tierra del Fuego to the northernmost part of South America. The Company was to be aided by State influence, and, if necessary, by the protection of the British army, besides having various profitable imposts assigned to it. In this way, it was represented, the public creditors would obtain interest for their loans without any expense to the nation, and some money, it was even hoped, would be saved, to go towards a fund for sinking the national debt.

The company was straightway formed, and had a quiet and tolerably harmless existence till 1720, "a year," says the contemporary historian, "remarkable beyond any other which can be pitched upon for extraordinary and romantic projects, proposals, and undertakings, both private and national, and which therefore ought to be had in perpetual remembrance, as it may serve for a perpetual memento to legislators never to leave it in the power of any hereafter to hoodwink mankind into so shameful and baneful an imposition on the credulity of the people, thereby diverted from their lawful industry." In 1719, Law's Mississippi scheme had been at its height in France, and that example gave unheard-of success to a like project of the South Sea Company's. The company proposed to buy up the whole national debt, and liquidate it by means of paper money, and the proposal, after some competition on the part of the Bank of England, was accepted. Thereupon ensued a scene of turmoil and disaster unparalleled in commercial history. The South Sea stock rose to a fabulous value, and the success of this wicked speculation encouraged a crowd of others as wicked.

THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE.

"Any impudent impostor," sys the historian, speaking from his own observation, "whilst the delusion was at its greatest height, needed only to hire a room at some coffee-house or other house near Exchange Alley for a few hours, and open a subscription-book for some what relative to commerce, manufacture, plantation, or some supposed invention, either newly hatched out of his own brain, or else stolen from some of the many abortive projects of former times, having first advertised it in the newspapers of the precieding day; and he might, in a few hours, find subscribers for one or two millions, in some cases more, of imaginary stogk. Yet many of those very subscribers were far from believing those projects feasible. It was enough for their purpose that there would very soon be premium on the receipts for those subscriptions, when they generally got rid of them in the crowded alleys to others more credulous than themselves."

It was nothing uncommon for shares to be sold at ten percent, more on one side of 'Change Alley than on the other, or to rise a hundred percent, in value in the course of a few hours. At one time the South Sea; 100 shares were to be sold for £1000 while East India stock rose from;100 to £445 and African stock from £21 to £200. The £10 shares of a York Buildings Company attained the fictitious value of £305, and the shares of a Welsh Copper Company, without having a penny of real capital, originally valued at £4 2s. 6d., could hardly be bought for £95. There is extant a list of nearly two hundred principal bubble companies started in this year of bubbles, "none of which were under a million, and some went as far as ten millions." One was designed to make salt water fresh; another, to furnish merchants with watches; a third, to discover perpetual motion; a fourth> to plant mulberry trees and breed silkworms in Chelsea Park; and a fifth, "to import a number of large jackasses from Spain, in order to propagate a larger kind of mules, in England."

So preposterous were many of the bona fide schemes, that one knows not whether it was in jest or in earnest that an advertisement was issued announcing that "at a certain place, on Tuesday next, books will be opened for a subscription of two millions for the invention of melting saw-dust and chips, and casting them into clean deal boards, without cracks or knots."

Well might Newton say, when asked what all this would end in, that "he could calculate the motions of erratic bodies, but not the madness of a multitude." Men had not long to wait, however, before the issues were clear to every one; grievous ruin to thousands upon thousands of innocent and foolish speculators, great stagnation to the general commerce of England, and an ugly blot upon the national honour.

Some men, however, shared without dishonour in the speculations, which reached their climax in the South Sea' Bubble, and thereby became very rich; and of these the most memorable was Thomas Guy. Having begun to make money by selling Bibles, as we saw, before the establishment of the Bank of England, he used it to make more money through upwards of thirty years. He employed his wealth in trading in Government securities, great and small. His first enterprise of this sort, according to tradition, was in a tolerably humble sort of trade. The needy agents of James II., following an example of long standing, were in the habit of paying the seamen of the Royal Navy, not in cash, but in pay-tickets or promissory-notes, for which cash was to be given at a distant day. As the seamen required their money at once, it was usual for them to sell their pay-tickets as soort as they were received, for whatever they could get for them; and Guy is said to have found it a very lucrative business to buy their tickets at about two-thirds of their nominal value, holding them till they became due, and he could recover the whole amount from the Government.

If he did so, that was only one of the many ways of money-makmg which he followed. "Formerly," says Macaulay, "when the Treasury was empty, when the taxes came in slowly, and when the pay of soldiers and sailors was in arrear, it was necessary for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to go, hat in hand, up and down Cheapside and Cornhill, attended by the Lord Mayor and by the Aldermen, to make up a sum by borrowing £100 from this hosier, and £200 from that ironmonger." Throughout James II.'s reign, until the Bank of England was founded, Guy the bookseller lent much money to the Government in that way, and received good interest for it. When a better state of things was introduced with the Bank, Guy continued to lend his money with great advantage upon the more orderly system that was established. He was one of the first contributors to the National Debt, which was formally begun in 1692. He also shared, to some extent, in the new business of stock-jobbing that came into fashion at about the same time. In all the financial speculations of the day, which seemed to him safe and honourable he freely took part In 1710, just when the South Sea Company was coming into favour, and when its £100 shares were to be bought for; £120 a-piece, he was possessed of £45,000 worth of its stock. Part of this he sold when the shares were worth £300 a-piece. The rest he kept for a few years more, and disposed of when he could get £600 for each of them. In ways of this sort he amassed great wealth.

And he used it well. Having become a man of mark, he entered Parliament in 1695, and retained his seat till 1707, if not longer.

"As he was a man of unbounded charity and universal benevolence," says his first biographer, "so he was likewise a great patron of liberty and the rights of his fellow-subjects; which, to his great honour, he strenuously asserted in divers Parliaments, whereof he was a member."

He sat in the House of Commons as Member for Tamworth, his mother's birth-place, in which he seems to have held property, and in which he always took a great interest. In 1705 he built and endowed some alms-houses there for fourteen poor men and women, with pensions for each occupier; and to that common form of charity he added the then unusual and excellent one of establishing a good free library for the poor. In 1707 he added three new wards to the old Hospital of St Thomas, in Southwark, the relic of an ancient monastery, which has lately been reconstructed near to Westminster Bridge. Other minor charities were done by him all through the time of his prosperity.

But his greatest act of charity was reserved to the last In 1720, when he was seventy-six, he made about; £300,000 by profitable speculations in the course of three months. That money he resolved to spend in building and endowing a new hospital, and his project was nobly carried through. When he died in 1724, the roof was being put to Guy's Hospital, the construction of which cost him about; £19,000; and the £220,000 with which he endowed it has enabled it to continue to this day as a splendid monument of his wealth, and of his wise application of it.