tions. Another member of this family (Sir Josiah
Child) deserves special mention as one of the earliest writers on
political economy and a man much in advance of his time. He saw through
the old fallacy about the balance of trade, and explained clearly the
true causes of the commercial prosperity of the Dutch. He also condemned
the practice of each parish paying for its own poor, an evil which all
Poor-law reformers have endeavoured to alter. Sir Josiah was at the head
of the East India Company, already feeling its way towards the gold and
diamonds of India. His brother was Governor of Bombay, and by the
marriage of his numerous daughters the rich merchant became allied to
half the peers and peeresses of England. The grandson of Alderman
Backwell married a daughter of the second Sir Francis Child, and his
daughter married William Praed, the Truro banker, who early in the
present century opened a bank at 189, Fleet Street. So, like three
strands of a gold chain, the three banking families were welded
together. In 1689 Child's bank seems to have for a moment tottered, but
was saved by the timely loan of L1,400 proffered by that overbearing
woman the Duchess of Marlborough. Hogarth is said to have made an oil
sketch of the scene, which was sold at Hodgson's sale-room in 1834, and
has since disappeared.

In Pennant's time (1793) the original goldsmith's shop seems to have
still existed in Fleet Street, in connection with this bank. The
principal of the firm was the celebrated Countess of Jersey, a former
earl having assumed the name of Child on the countess inheriting the
estates of her maternal grandfather, Robert Child, Esq., of Osterly
Park, Middlesex. A small full-length portrait of this great beauty of
George IV.'s court, painted by Lawrence in his elegant but meretricious
manner, hangs in the first-floor room of the old bank. The last Child
died early in this century. A descendant of Addison is a member of the
present firm. In Chapter 1., Book I., of his "Tale of Two Cities,"
Dickens has sketched Child's bank with quite an Hogarthian force and
colour. He has playfully exaggerated the smallness, darkness, and
ugliness of the building, of which he describes the partners as so
proud; but there is all his usual delightful humour, occasionally
passing into caricature:--

"Thus it had come to pass that Telson's was the triumphant perfection of
inconvenience. After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with a
weak ratt