employed in the offices of the bank, to receive the voluminous claims of its creditors. On the restoration of peace, its advantages to the mercantile world will probably cause it, with proper modifications, to be revived, and under honest and upright direction, it may again become an useful and respectable institution.
The external appearance of the stadthouse is noble and grand; and certainly it is in every respect worthy of the opulent city, for the accommodation of which it was erected. The entrance, by seven small gates, has been censured as mean for so magnificent a building, and undoubtedly an elegant portal would have been more congenial to the architecture of the whole. But here security was preferred to beauty. The burgomasters who superintended the building of the stadthouse, considering that the treasures of the bank, the archives of the city, and the documents of the public offices, would be lodged in it; and knowing the turbulence and instability of the populace
