n, a man of ability,
spirit and patriotism, who had entered into the design with enthusiasm
not inferior to that of Fletcher. Argyle held fifteen hundred pounds.
John Dalrymple, but too well known as the Master of Stair, had just
succeeded to his father's title and estate, and was now Viscount Stair.
He put down his name for a thousand pounds. The number of Scotch peers
who subscribed was between thirty and forty. The City of Edinburgh, in
its corporate capacity, took three thousand pounds, the City of Glasgow
three thousand, the City of Perth two thousand. But the great majority
of the subscribers contributed only one hundred or two hundred pounds
each. A very few divines who were settled in the capital or in other
large towns were able to purchase shares. It is melancholy to see in the
roll the name of more than one professional man whose paternal anxiety
led him to lay out probably all his hardly earned savings in purchasing
a hundred pound share for each of his children. If, indeed, Paterson's
predictions had been verified, such a share would, according to the
notions of that age and country, have been a handsome portion for the
daughter of a writer or a surgeon.

That the Scotch are a people eminently intelligent, wary, resolute and
self possessed, is obvious to the most superficial observation. That
they are a people peculiarly liable to dangerous fits of passion and
delusions of the imagination is less generally acknowledged, but is
not less true. The whole kingdom seemed to have gone mad. Paterson had
acquired an influence resembling rather that of the founder of a new
religion, that of a Mahomet, that of a Joseph Smith, than that of a
commercial projector. Blind faith in a religion, fanatical zeal for a
religion, are too common to astonish us. But such faith and zeal seem
strangely out of place in the transactions of the money market. It is
true that we are judging after the event. But before the event materials
sufficient for the forming of a sound judgment were within the reach of
all who cared to use them. It seems incredible that men of sense, who
had only a vague and general notion of Paterson's scheme, should
have staked every thing on the success of that scheme. It seems more
incredible still that men to whom the details of that scheme had been
confided should not have looked into any of the common books of history
or geography in which an account of Darien might have been found, and
should not have aske