tion, from
the small beginnings of a few persons meeting in a coffee-house,
till now, when it may be said well-nigh to monopolise the
maritime-assurance business of the world. Not even America has been
able to set up a rival to it at all worthy of the name; and hundreds
of the long-voyage vessels of the States, as well as of all European
powers, are insured here. There is, to be sure, a continental
association that has borrowed its name without leave, and dubbed
itself the 'Austrian Lloyd's'--a designation which forcibly reminds
one of the remark of Coleridge when told that Kotzebue assumed to be
the German Shakspeare: 'Quite so,' replied the author of the
_Ancient Mariner_, 'a very German Shakspeare indeed.' The
correspondence of the true Lloyd's is of course immense--enormous:
their agents are everywhere; and so admirably regulated does the
vast machine appear to be that litigation between owners and
underwriters is almost unknown. This is doubtless one of the causes
of the prodigious success of the institution.

There is little more to notice in the Royal Exchange, except that
the interior decorations are very tastefully executed; and therefore
turn we now to this leviathan Bank of England--to the long,
irregular, and by no means imposing line of building on our left.
This is William Cobbett's Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, whose
rickety constitution and failing powers--according to that bold and
blundering financier--betokened almost immediate dissolution more
than a quarter of a century ago. Other men, less dominated by
unreasoning prejudice than the author of the 'Political Register,'
deceived themselves into the same notion; and it is very possible
that there are even now persons who hold the faith as it was in
Cobbett--just as we are told in one of Mr Disraeli's novels, that
the Greek mythology is still the creed of a fragment of humanity
existing somewhere in the mountains of Syria. At all events, since
the late Sir Robert Peel placed it beyond the power of the governor
and company to indulge in dangerous or erratic courses, it is
abundantly manifest that to doubt of the perfect stability of the
Bank of England is tantamount to questioning the infallibility of
arithmetic. In the vaults and coffers of this huge establishment
there is at present--as we learn from the published weekly-returns,
a device of Sir Robert's--the bewildering amount of between
L.14,000,000 and L.15,000,000 sterling in gold and silver!