ousand per annum. A Merchant is ruined when, by the sudden convulsions
of mercantile affairs, he is removed from the unlimited command of
millions to pass his days, at Leamington or Cheltenham, on his wife's
jointure of two thousand a-year.

His clerk is ruined when he drops his pocket-book on his way from the
Bank, and loses six hundred pounds belonging to the firm. His is more
real ruin, for it implies stoppages, suspicion--mayhap loss of place,
and its consequences.

But I have lost every thing! Hamerton and Scott, my bankers, have
failed; their liabilities, as the phrase is--meaning thereby what they
are liable to be asked for, but cannot satisfy--are enormous. My only
landed property is small, and so heavily mortgaged as to be worth
nothing. I had only waited for the term of an agreement to redeem
the mortgage, and clear off all encumbrances; but the "crash" has
anticipated me, and I am now a beggar!

Yes, there is the letter, in all cold and chilling civility, curtly
stating that "the unprecedented succession of calamities, by which
public credit has been affected, have left the firm no other alternative
but that of a short suspension of payment! Sincerely trusting, however,
that they will be enabled----" and so forth. These announcements have
but one burden--the creditors are to be mulcted, while the debtor
continues to hope!

And now for my own share in the misfortune. Is it the momentary access
of excitement, or is it some passing rally in my constitution? but I
certainly feel better, and in higher spirits, than I have done for many
a day. It is long since I indulged in my old habit of castle-building;
and yet now, at every instant, some new notion strikes me, and I fancy
some new field for active labour and exertion. To the present Ministers
I am slightly known--sufficiently to ask for employment, if not in my
former career, in some other. Should this fail, I have yet powerful
friends to ask for me. Not that I like either of these plans--this
playing "_antichambre_" is a sore penance at my time of life. Had I
health and strength, I'd emigrate. I really do wonder why men of a
certain rank, younger sons especially, do not throw their fortunes into
the colonies. Apart from the sense of enterprise, there is an immense
gain, in the fact that individual exertion, be it of head or hand, can
exercise, free from the trammels of conventional prejudices, which
so rule and restrain us at home. If we merely venture to