y nature, because coin in itself was
barren and unpropagating, unlike corn, of which every grain will produce
many. But Audley considered no doubt that money was not incapable of
multiplying itself, provided it was in hands which knew to make it grow
and "breed," as Shylock affirmed. The lawyers then, however, did not
agree with the divines, nor the college philosophers; they were
straining at a more liberal interpretation of this odious term "Usury."
Lord Bacon declared, that the suppression of Usury is only fit for an
Utopian government; and Audley must have agreed with the learned Cowell,
who in his "Interpreter" derives the term ab _usu_ et _aere_, quasi _usu
aera_, which in our vernacular style was corrupted into _Usury_. Whatever
the _sin_ might be in the eye of some, it had become at least a
_controversial sin_, as Sir Symonds D'Ewes calls it, in his manuscript
Diary, who, however, was afraid to commit it.[73] Audley, no doubt,
considered that _interest_ was nothing more than _rent_ for _money_; as
_rent_ was no better than _Usury_ for _land_. The legal interest was
then "ten in the hundred;" but the thirty, the fifty, and the hundred
for the hundred, the gripe of Usury, and the shameless contrivances of
the money-traders, these he would attribute to the follies of others, or
to his own genius.

This sage on the wealth of nations, with his pithy wisdom and quaint
sagacity, began with two hundred pounds, and lived to view his
mortgages, his statutes, and his judgments so numerous, that it was
observed his papers would have made a good map of England. A
contemporary dramatist, who copied from life, has opened the chamber of
such an Usurer,--perhaps of our Audley.

---- Here lay
A manor bound fast in a skin of parchment,
The wax continuing hard, the acres melting;
Here a sure deed of gift for a market-town,
If not redeem'd this day, which is not in
The unthrift's power; there being scarce one shire
In Wales or England, where my monies are not
Lent out at usury, the certain hook
To draw in more.
MASSINGER'S _City Madam_.

This genius of thirty per cent. first had proved the decided vigour of
his mind, by his enthusiastic devotion to his law-studies: deprived of
the leisure for study through his busy day, he stole the hours from his
late nights and his early mornings; and without the means to procure a
law-library, he invented a method to pos