obtained, he did not condescend
to inform them at that time, but promised that in a month full particulars
should be duly announced, and a call made for the remaining 98l. of the
subscription. Next morning, at nine o'clock, this great man opened an
office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up
at three o'clock, he found that no less than one thousand shares had been
subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was thus, in five hours, the
winner of 2000l. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his
venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never
heard of again.

Well might Swift exclaim, comparing Change Alley to a gulf in the South
Sea:

"Subscribers here by thousands float,
And jostle one another down,
Each paddling in his leaky boat,
And here they fish for gold and drown.

Now buried in the depths below,
Now mounted up to heaven again,
They reel and stagger to and fro,
At their wit's end, like drunken men.

Meantime, secure on Garraway cliffs,
A savage race, by shipwrecks fed,
Lie waiting for the foundered skiffs,
And strip the bodies of the dead."

Another fraud that was very successful was that of the "Globe _Permits_,"
as they were called. They were nothing more than square pieces of
playing-cards, on which was the impression of a seal, in wax, bearing the
sign of the Globe Tavern, in the neighbourhood of Exchange Alley, with the
inscription of "Sail-Cloth Permits." The possessors enjoyed no other
advantage from them than permission to subscribe at some future time to a
new sail-cloth manufactory, projected by one who was then known to be a
man of fortune, but who was afterwards involved in the peculation and
punishment of the South-Sea directors. These permits sold for as much as
sixty guineas in the Alley.

Persons of distinction, of both sexes, were deeply engaged in all these
bubbles; those of the male sex going to taverns and coffee-houses to meet
their brokers, and the ladies resorting for the same purpose to the shops
of milliners and haberdashers. But it did not follow that all these people
believed in the feasibility of the schemes to which they subscribed; it
was enough for their purpose that their shares would, by stock-jobbing
arts, be soon raised to a premium, when they got rid of them with all
expedition to the really credulous. So great was the confusion of the
crowd in the alle