elancholy-looking,
handsome brick and stone edifice, to the left, where Threadneedle Street
abuts upon Bishopsgate? I dare say thou hast often admired its
magnificent portals, ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave
court, with cloisters and pillars, with few or no traces of goers-in or
comers-out--a desolation something like Balclutha's.[11] This was once a
house of trade--a centre of busy interests. The throng of merchants was
here--the quick pulse of gain--and here some forms of business are still
kept up, though the soul has long since fled. Here are still to be seen
stately porticoes; imposing staircases; offices roomy as the state
apartments in palaces--deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling
clerks; the still more sacred interiors of court and committee rooms,
with venerable faces of beadles, door-keepers; directors seated in form
on solemn days (to proclaim a dead dividend), at long worm-eaten tables,
that have been mahogany, with tarnished gilt-leather coverings,
supporting massy silver inkstands, long since dry; the oaken wainscots
hung with pictures of deceased governors and sub-governors, of Queen
Anne, and the two first monarchs of the Brunswick dynasty; huge charts,
which subsequent discoveries have antiquated; dusty maps of Mexico, dim
as dreams; and soundings of the Bay of Panama! The long passages hung
with buckets, appended, in idle row to walls, whose substance might defy
any, short of the last conflagration; with vast ranges of cellarage
under all, where dollars and pieces-of-eight once lay, 'an unsunned
heap,' for Mammon to have solaced his solitary heart withal--long since
dissipated, or scattered into air at the blast of the breaking of that
famous Bubble.

"Peace to the manes of the Bubble! Silence and destitution are upon thy
walls, proud house, for a memorial! Situated as thou art in the very
heart of stirring and living commerce, amid the fret and fever of
speculation--with the Bank, and the 'Change, and the India House about
thee, in the hey-day of present prosperity, with their important faces,
as it were, insulting thee, their _poor neighbour out of business_--to
the idle and merely contemplative--to such as me, Old House! there is a
charm in thy quiet, a cessation, a coolness from business, an indolence
almost cloistral, which is delightful! With what reverence have I paced
thy great bare rooms and courts at eventide! They spake of the past; the
shade of some dead accoun