IX. THE PILLARS OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE.

CONSIDERING that, as it is stated on high authority, the English are a nation of Shopkeepers, it seems very strange that in one of the most important branches of shopkeeping, the barter in money, our leading men have always been foreigners. From the time that the first Italians established themselves in Lombard Street, down to the advent of Nathan, the son of Meyer Amschel, foreigners have dealt largest in money, foreigners have been the highest speculators in cash and scrip, and foreigners have made the greatest fortunes in this traffic. Foreigners, in fact, have been the pillars of the Stock Exchange. With very few exceptions, all those among us who ever amassed great wealth by dealing in money, were either aliens or of foreign extraction. The Barings came from Germany; the Thellussons from France; and three other famous gatherers of millions, Rothschild, Goldsmid, and Sampson Gideon, were Jews.

The history of the last-named great banker and stockbroker forms a very interesting episode in the history of the Stock Exchange. In one respect, Sampson Gideon was more successful than Nathan Rothschild, for while the family of the latter did not rise in social distinction higher than to a poor Austrian barony, that of the former scaled up into the seventh heaven of the British peerage. Sampson, the Croesus of the Stock Exchange towards the end of the last century, and intimate friend of Sir Robert Walpole, was a shrewd, sarcastic man, possessed of a rich vein of humour, noble and generous in all affairs of ordinary life, and in every respect the counterpart of his famous successor of the Red Shield. There are a good many anecdotes of the first "great Jew broker," some of them rather characteristic of his life and times. In one of his dealings with Mr. Snow, the banker-immortalized by Dean SwiftGideon had occasion to borrow £20,000, Very shortly afterwards a panic occurred, and Mr. Snow, alarmed for the safety of his loan, addressed a piteous epistle to the Jew, entreating him to pay the money at once, and thereby to save him from bankruptcy and utter ruin. Gideon knew his man well, and determined to

give him back the coveted property, but to punish him at the same time for his want of confidence. So he sent for a phial of hartshorn, and, wrapping it in twenty notes of £1,000 each, returned the loan in this form to "Mr. Thomas Snow, goldsmith, near Temple Bar." Gideon was active in establishing one of the early insurance and annuity societies, in the welfare of which he took an active part, not unmixed with occasional droll behaviour. "Never grant life annuities to old women," he would say, "they wither but they never die;" and if the proposed candidate approached with a violent asthmatic cough, he perhaps called out, "Ay, ma'am, you may cough, but it sha'n't save you six months' purchase." Under all this rough, unfriendly outside, Sampson Gideon hid a kindly heart.

He educated all his children in the Christian faith, but was unwilling himself to change his religion. He pleaded that he was too stiff and old; observing wisely that change of religion is a foolish and unproductive affair at a time when life is turning into the sere and yellow leaf. But he was anxious, nevertheless, that his sons should become good Christians, and, with this view, he used to examine them him

self in the tenets of faith. At these periodical examinations Sampson sometimes went a little out of his depth, and questions were put and answers given which would shock the orthodoxy alike of Jew and Christian. One day, probing his son on the progress made in his religious studies, Sampson put to the hopeful young Christian the query, "Who made you?" The prompt answer was, "God." And next, "Who redeemed you?" to which the proper reply was given. Old Sampson now got fidgety; he knew he had to put a third question, but had clean forgotten the text. So in his embarrassment, he stammered out, "And who-who-who gave you that hat?" Whereupon young hopeful shouted with great energy, "The Holy Ghost."

Through the influence of Sampson with Walpole, this exemplary young Christian was created a baronet at the age of eleven, and advanced to the dignity of an Irish baron soon after he had reached manhood. Old Sampson desired his son should be called Sir Sampson Gideon; but the young nobleman did not relish his Scriptural name, and, after his father's death, changed his appellation into Sir S. G. Eardley, having obtained the latter name from a marriage with the daughter of Sir John Eardley Wilmot,

Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. Old Sampson died in 1762, having amassed a fortune valued at nearly a million. "Gideon is dead," says one of the writers of the day, "worth more than the whole land of Canaan. He has left the reversion of all his milk and honey, after his son and daughter, and their children, to the Duke of Devonshire, without insisting on the duke taking his name or being circumcised."

The contrast of the great Jew broker of the last century with Nathan Rothschild is strikingly shown in the will of the former, by which he left £1,000 to the synagogue of his countrymen ; £1,000 to the London Hospital; and £2,000, besides an annual donation, to the Sons of the Clergy. Sampson's son, the first Lord Eardley, a very eccentric man, squandered a good deal of the money gained by his sire in political and electioneering jobs, and was also vain enough to spend large sums in the attempt to marry his children into "old families." There came not much, after all, of this desire to gain ancestral honours for the Gideons. A third little Sampson saw the light of the world in 1770, and grew up into a Lord Eardley; but he was destined to be the last of his race. Since 1824, the title