for trading in and improving certain commodities of this kingdom, three millions—and even, carrying the indefinite still farther than this, for an undertaking which shall in due time be revealed! For this last we are told a subscription was actually opened. The most absurd of these bubbles, indeed, seem not to have wanted dupes. "From morning till evening," says Anderson, "the dealers therein, as well as in South Sea stock, appeared in continual crowds all over Exchange Alley, so as to choke up the passage through it. Not a week-day passed without fresh projects recommended by pompous advertisements in all the newspapers (which were now swelled enormously), directing where to subscribe to them. On some sixpence per cent, was paid down, on others one shilling per cent., and some came so low as one shilling per thousand at the time of subscribing. Some of the obscure keepers of those books of subscription, contenting themselves with what they had got in the forenoon by the subscriptions of one or two millions (one of which the author particularly well remembers), were not to be found in the afternoon of the same day, the room they had hired for a day being shut up, and they and their subscription books never heard of more." The utmost that appears to have been paid even on those projects that "had one or more persons of known credit to midwife them into the alley" was ten shillings per cent. "Persons of quality of both sexes," continues our author, "were deeply engaged in many of these bubbles, avarice prevailing at this time over all considerations of either dignity or equity; the males coming to taverns and coffee-houses to meet their brokers, and the ladies to the shops of milliners and haberdashers for the same ends. Any impudent impostor, whilst the delusion was at its greatest height, needed only to hire a room at some coffee-house or other house near that alley for a few hours, and open a subscription-book for somewhat relative to commerce, manufacture, plantation, or of some supposed invention, either newly hatched out of his own brain, or else stolen from some of the many abortive projects of which we have given an account in former
