ld purchase a hundred a
year for life, "which," said Fenton, "will make you sure of a clean
shirt and a shoulder of mutton every day." This counsel was rejected;
the profit and principal were both lost, and Gay sunk so low under the
calamity that his life for a time became in danger.

Pope, always eager for money, was also dabbling in the scheme, but it is
uncertain whether he made money or lost by it. Lady Mary Wortley
Montague was a loser. When Sir Isaac Newton was asked when the bubble
would break, he said, with all his calculations he had never learned to
calculate the madness of the people.

Prior declared, "I am lost in the South Sea. The roaring of the waves
and the madness of the people are justly put together. It is all wilder
than St. Anthony's dream, and the bagatelle is more solid than anything
that has been endeavoured here this year."

In the full heat of it, the Duchess of Ormond wrote to Swift: "The king
adopts the South Sea, and calls it his beloved child; though perhaps,
you may say, if he loves it no better than his son, it may not be saying
much; but he loves it as much as he loves the Duchess of Kendal, and
that is saying a good deal. I wish it may thrive, for some of my friends
are deep in it. I wish you were too."

Swift, cold and stern, escaped the madness, and even denounced in the
following verses the insanity that had seized the times:--

"There is a gulf where thousands fell,
Here all the bold adventurers came;
A narrow sound, though deep as hell--
Change Alley is the dreadful name.

"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."

Budgell, Pope's barking enemy, destroyed himself after his losses in
this South Sea scheme, and a well-known man of the day called "Tom of
Ten Thousand" lost his reason.

Charles Lamb, in his "Elia," has described the South Sea House in his
own delightful way. "Reader," says the poet clerk, "in thy passage from
the Bank--where thou hast been receiving thy half-yearly dividends
(supposing thou art a lean annuitant like myself)--to the 'Flower Pot,'
to secure a place for Dalston, or Shacklewell, or some other shy suburban
retreat northerly--didst thou never observe a m