terest
are no longer citizens. They avoid, they almost contemn, municipal
honours and duties. Those honours and duties are abandoned to men who,
though useful and highly respectable, seldom belong to the princely
commercial houses of which the names are renowned throughout the world.

In the seventeenth century the City was the merchant's residence. Those
mansions of the great old burghers which still exist have been turned
into counting houses and warehouses: but it is evident that they were
originally not inferior in magnificence to the dwellings which were then
inhabited by the nobility. They sometimes stand in retired and gloomy
courts, and are accessible only by inconvenient passages: but their
dimensions are ample, and their aspect stately. The entrances are
decorated with richly carved pillars and canopies. The staircases and
landing places are not wanting in grandeur. The floors are sometimes of
wood tessellated after the fashion of France. The palace of Sir Robert
Clayton, in the Old Jewry, contained a superb banqueting room wainscoted
with cedar, and adorned with battles of gods and giants in fresco. [108]
Sir Dudley North expended four thousand pounds, a sum which would then
have been important to a Duke, on the rich furniture of his reception
rooms in Basinghall Street. [109] In such abodes, under the last
Stuarts, the heads of the great firms lived splendidly and hospitably.
To their dwelling place they were bound by the strongest ties of
interest and affection. There they had passed their youth, had made
their friendships, had courted their wives had seen their children grow
up, had laid the remains of their parents in the earth, and expected
that their own remains would be laid. That intense patriotism which is
peculiar to the members of societies congregated within a narrow space
was, in such circumstances, strongly developed. London was, to the
Londoner, what Athens was to the Athenian of the age of Pericles, what
Florence was to the Florentine of the fifteenth century. The citizen
was proud of the grandeur of his city, punctilious about her claims to
respect, ambitious of her offices, and zealous for her franchises.

At the close of the reign of Charles the Second the pride of the
Londoners was smarting from a cruel mortification. The old charter had
been taken away; and the magistracy had been remodelled. All the civic
functionaries were Tories: and the Whigs, though in numbers and in
wealth superior