ook worn out, and fallen into
decay. Witness the noble house of Sir John Eyles, himself a merchant, at
Giddy-hall near Rumford; Sir Gregory Page on Blackheath, the son of a
brewer; Sir Nathaniel Mead near Wealgreen, his father a linen-draper,
with many others too long to repeat; and, to crown all, the Lord
Castlemains at Wanstead, his father Sir Josiah Child, originally a
tradesman.

It was a smart, but just repartee, of a London tradesman, when a
gentleman, who had a good estate too, rudely reproached him in company,
and bade him hold his tongue, for he was no gentleman. 'No, Sir,' says
he, 'but I can buy a gentleman, and therefore I claim a liberty to speak
among gentlemen.'

Again, in how superior a port or figure (as we now call it) do our
tradesmen live, to what the middling gentry either do or can support! An
ordinary tradesman now, not in the city only, but in the country, shall
spend more money by the year, than a gentleman of four or five hundred
pounds a-year can do, and shall increase and lay up every year too,
whereas the gentleman shall at the best stand stock still, just where he
began, nay, perhaps decline; and as for the lower gentry, from a hundred
pounds a-year to three hundred, or thereabouts, though they are often as
proud and high in their appearance as the other--as to them, I say, a
shoemaker in London shall keep a better house, spend more money, clothe
his family better, and yet grow rich too. It is evident where the
difference lies; _an estate's a pond, but a trade's a spring_: the
first, if it keeps full, and the water wholesome, by the ordinary
supplies and drains from the neighbouring grounds, it is well, and it is
all that is expected; but the other is an inexhausted current, which not
only fills the pond, and keeps it full, but is continually running over,
and fills all the lower ponds and places about it.

This being the case in England, and our trade being so vastly great, it
is no wonder that the tradesmen in England fill the lists of our
nobility and gentry; no wonder that the gentlemen of the best families
marry tradesmen's daughters, and put their younger sons apprentices to
tradesmen; and how often do these younger sons come to buy the elder
son's estates, and restore the family, when the elder, and head of the
house, proving rakish and extravagant, has wasted his patrimony, and is
obliged to make out the blessing of Israel's family, where the younger
son bought the birthright, an