Friend, in words thou oftimes named'st me, Sharer of thy woe or weal; Let my soul be merged in thine As like essences combine, Or as ebbing waves unite And twain in one, may hope to live To know the blessings all things give. For selfishness within the breast Is nurse of sadness and unrest; There, close enshrin'd, she'll fix her throne, Oxford, Nov. 28, 1858. FACTS NOT GENERALLY KNOWN. J. A youth who ador'd conic sections had many and great imperfections: quite regardless of cost all his luggage he lost, for want of the proper directions! A boy of a bad disposition, who loved not his master's tuition, was so vulgar one day as to smoke a short clay, and at night got a long imposition. A boy, who was on the foundation, for want of a good circulation, one night, being found without life on the ground, was a very great loss to the nation. A Greenlander once, I am told, was so very excessively cold, that he sat, to get hot, in a large mustard pot, and came out as yellow as gold. They tell me that Jeremy Taylor once entered a ship as a sailor, but that when he got in it he was sick in a minute, unfortunate Jeremy Taylor! THE NEW RUGBEIAN. No. IV. FEBRUARY, 1859. POPULAR EXCITEMENTS. THE subject which I have now chosen to illustrate the peculiarities exhibited by these excitements, differs widely from either of those in the two former numbers. We do not see in it that patriotic feeling which so eminently characterised the time of the Spanish Armada, impelling men, women, and children to rise in defence of their country; nor do we see that other phase of patriotic feeling which by its very intensity became the cause of that cowardly and fanatical cruelty, striking at once the innocent and the guilty, which renders the history of the Popish Plot so distressing to all English readers. And yet the predominant features of this movement bear the same stamp as those of the other two, though it was lust of gold, and not patriotic feeling, which acted in this case upon the public mind. Under the influence of this passion, people of all sects, sexes, ranks, and ages eagerly and thoughtlessly rushed in pursuit of one object, with as much impetuosity as when they were impelled by the dread of the Papists, or the love of their country. If, then, we look at Exchange Alley in the spring of the year 1720, we shall find in the anxious faces P and pushing crowds that surround the various coffee house doors, a very good picture in miniature of the state of the whole of England at that eventful period. Let us however examine more closely the scene which presents itself. A great crowd of men, women, and children are bustling about, and jostling one another in their attempts to enter the various coffee houses which abound here. In the windows all along the street may be seen placards such as these: "Two million wanted for an undertaking which shall hereafter be revealed, which is sure to return at least 700 per cent. ;" "Globe Permits for subscribing, some time or other, to a project for a sailcloth manufacture;" "South Sea Stock 1000 per cent." Here a man with loud voice proclaims from a house door, that his project for making pantiles will soon produce 350 per cent. and that his subscription book is still open,—only two and sixpence to be deposited. Here a pawnbroker's shop is besieged by men and women even of the highest rank, who hasten to pawn their jewels or even their swords to obtain money, wherewith to engage in such promising speculation. On the other hand we see a poor miserable looking woman with a child half-famished clinging with starving energy to its mother's breast. She is pawning her shawl that she may pay down the half-crown thus obtained, to some impudent impostor, in the hopes of reaping at some future time a golden harvest, that so she may keep her child from starvation and cold. She will return that evening, but the golden hope will have gone for ever; the shop is deserted; the man to whom she entrusted her mite fled, and she left alone with her child to starvation, cold, and death, or something worse. But these trifling speculations are not all. If we look deeper we shall find by their side speculations of such im mensity that even in this age of monster gambling we start with amazement. In those days 300 per cent. was no uncommon price for stock, nor did speculators shrink from entering into engagements, to fulfil which all the current coin in the whole of Europe would not have sufficed. We see the grave statesman and the rich millionaire come to pay their subscription, or to buy stock in some of those great schemes, which were destined by their inventors to be the salvation of England. But the inventors, in their anxiety to save England, had allowed the schemes to assume proportions too gigantic; so instead of saving England they fell, and bore with them in their fall those who trusted to them. Thousands were overwhelmed in the ruins of speculations which must from their outset have appeared ridiculous from their immensity. I purpose now to give a slight sketch of the rise and progress of the South Sea Scheme, as it was the greatest of the many speculations which abounded about this time, and was the one which formed the model of many of the bubbles which arose after it, both in this and other countries. It had long been the great object of the ministries which had successively attained to power to do away with the National Debt at any cost. Now this debt had been accumulating for a century, or more, till it had reached an amount, which, small as it may appear in our eyes, when compared with what it is at present, seemed at the end of Queen Anne's reign, great enough to excite the fear that the national credit would be shaken. It was in the year 1711, that the great Earl of Oxford became Prime Minister and Lord Treasurer. He saw |