immense importance to the commercial classes of a great country, was, in this instance, repeated from generation to generation, without any contradiction whatever. The old saying that men willingly believe what they wish to be true was reversed on this notable occasion; for men, and shrewd business men too, actually took upon trust a fact which they neither wished nor hoped for, believing in the existence of a huge monopoly which the most cursory examination would have been able to destroy.

XIV. COUNTRY BANKING AND LOTTERIES.

THE passing of the Act of 1708 had the consequences expected by its promoters, the directors of the Bank of England. All co-partnerships of more than six persons being forbidden by law, several existing joint-stock banks had to wind up business, while projects of many new ones were killed in the bud. The Act tacitly gave encouragement to small shop-keepers, and people of fertile brains but limited means, to establish banks and issue notes, while it put a stop to the association of persons of position, respectability, and credit, willing to embark their capital in the same trade. There was no licence required to set up as a banker, nor was there, previous to the year 1774, any legislative restriction to the issue of small notes. sequently, Lilliputian banking establishments sprang up, like mushrooms, all over England, as soon as the formidable competition of jointstock banks was removed, and the trade was

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left to the great Government Bank on the one hand, and individual enterprise-often of the dishonest kind-on the other. It was in the provinces particularly that the business of banking remained, for the greater part of the eighteenth century, very little removed from that of the tailor or shoemaker. The origin of many of the more important country banks may even now be traced to these humble beginnings. The " Old Gloucester Bank," which represents, probably, the second oldest private bank in the kingdom-Child's, at Temple Bar, being the first-was founded by a Mr. James Wood, in the year 1716, and was originally nothing but a chandler's shop of the smallest kind, the owner of which distinguished himself from other chandlers by discounting bills, as well as selling soap and cheese. The bank was continued by several generations of Woods, and though they made money fast, they did not give up the shop, but only enlarged it, and very likely sold their soap at a better price.

James Wood the Third, a man celebrated as a Croesus in his days—he was born in 1756, and died in 1836-was the last to keep the ancestral shop, in which he sold almost everything, from a mouse-trap and a slice of bacon to diamond

bracelets and ducal coronets. The bacon-andcheese business was transacted at one end of the shop, and at the other was the Old Gloucester Bank, which earls were not too proud to enter —knowing that the owner was worth a million. But the halo of his magic million did not make James Wood the Third a happy and contented man; on the contrary, he seems to have been, to the hour of his death, one of the most hardworked and miserable creatures. Swinging like a pendulum between his shop and his bank, the whole business of which he managed with two clerks, his existence was literally broken up by petty cares and anxieties. His dinner was settled to cost no more than fourpence, and his sleep was regulated to be no more than six hours; while the remaining eighteen hours of morning, noon, and night, were spent in regular and unceasing vibrations between the two corners of counting-house and shop. Of course, he was unmarried, the poor banker-grocer; and when he died, the wonderful million which he had amassed fell into the lap of a score of gaping relatives, all anxiously awaiting the decease of the old bachelor. However, though the fortune fell into their hands, the anxious "friends" did not get it after all. For between the cup and

the lip there were still more eager heirs-priests of the blind goddess of justice, in Chancery Lane. Suits and cross suits, actions and counter actions, followed in the wake of the Probate of Will, and, at the hour that is, the gentlemen of the long robe must have well-nigh pocketed the million, gathered, with so much care and anxiety, in the old shop, by the three generations of Woods of Gloucester.

More illustrative still of the origin of many country banking houses than the foregoing example, is the rise of the old banking establishment of Smith, of Nottingham, now merged in the well-known firm of Smith, Payne, and Co. of Lombard-street. Smith the First, the Smith of all the other Smiths, was, at the beginning of the last century, a respectable draper at Nottingham, well patronised by the gudewives of the farmers, who bought their quarterly stock of thread and ribbons at his shop, after having sold their pigs. The wives, of course, brought the husbands, and though the latter wanted no caps and laces, they liked to have a quiet half hour in the cozy back parlour, to discuss the news of the day and the state of the markets with Mr. Smith. A frequent theme of conversation was the danger of the roads. The neigh