their hopes or fears, their pleasures or their pains. But in the afternoon, when they have all dined, or composed themselves to pass the day without a dinner, their passions have full play, and I can perceive one man wondering at the stupidity of the public, by which his new book has been totally neglected; another cursing the French, who fright away literary curiosity by their threat of an invasion; another swearing at his bookseller, who will advance no money without 'copy'; another perusing as he walks his publisher's bill; another murmuring at an unanswerable criticism; another determining to write no more to a generation of barbarians; and another wishing to try once again whether he cannot awaken the drowsy world to a sense of his merit." This extract seems to us to form an admirable companion picture to that in which we have already shown Goldsmith bantering his brother Jacobite, Johnson, as they looked up together at the grim heads on Temple Bar.
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No. 1 — formerly a quiet, grave-looking house, next to Temple Bar, but now replaced by a building more worthy of the site — is the oldest banking-house in London except one. For two centuries gold has here been shovelled about, and reams of bank-notes have been shuffled over by practised thumbs. Private banks originated in the stormy days before the Civil War, when wealthy citizens, afraid of what might happen, entrusted their money to their goldsmiths to take care of till the troubles had blown over. In the time of the Stuarts, Francis Child, an industrious apprentice of the old school, married the daughter of his master William Wheeler, a goldsmith, who lived one door west of Temple Bar, and in due time succeeded to his estate and business. In the first London Directory (1677), among the fifty-eight goldsmiths, thirty-eight of whom lived in Lombard Street, "Blanchard & Child," at the "Marygold," Fleet Street, figure conspicuously as "keeping
