Whilst from the hollow crannies of this rock
Music shall sound to recreate my Love.
But tell me, had you ever Lover yet?

Lucilia. I had a Lover, I think; but who it was,
Or where, or how long since, aye me! I know not:
Yet beat my timerous thoughts on such a thing.
I feel a passionate heat, yet find no flame;
Think what I know not, nor know what I think.

Ench. Hast thou forgot me then? I am thy Love,-
Whom sweetly thou wert wont to entertain
With looks, with vows of love, with amorous kisses.
Look'st thou so strange? dost thou not know me yet?
Luc. Sure I should know you.

Ench. Why, Love, doubt you that?
'Twas I that led you thro' the painted meads,
Where the light fairies danced upon the flowers,
Ranging on every leaf an orient pearl,
Which, struck together with the silken wind
Of their loose mantles, made a silver chime.
'Twas I that, winding my shrill bugle horn,
Made a gilt palace break out of the hill,
Fill'd suddenly with troops of knights and dames,
Who danced and revel'd; whilst we sweetly slept
Upon a bed of roses, wrapt all in gold.
Dost thou not know me now?

Luc. Yes, now I know thee.

Ench. Come then, confirm this knowledge with a kiss.

Luc. Nay, stay; you are not he: how strange is this!

Ench. Thou art grown passing strange, my Love, To him that made thee so long since his Bride.

Luc. O was it you? come then. O stay awhile.
I know not where I am, nor what I am;
Nor you, nor these I know, nor any thing.

Life of an Usurer.

HUGH AUDLEY.

C. L.

There are memoirs of this remarkable man in a rare quarto tract, entitled "The Way to be Rich, according to the practice of the great Audley, who began with two hundred pounds in the year 1605, and died worth four hundred thousand." He died on the 15th of November, 1662, the year wherein the tract was printed.

Hugh Audley was a lawyer, and a great practical philosopher, who concentrated his vigorous faculties in the science of the relative value of money. He flourished through the reigns of James I., Charles I., and held a lucrative office in the "court of wards," till that singular court was abolished at the time of the restoration. In his own times he was called "The great Audley," an epithet so often abused, and here applied to

* In charmed visions.

the creation of enormous wealth. But there are minds of great capacity, concealed by the nature of their pursuits; and the wealth of Audley may be considered as the cloudy medium through which a bright genius shone, of which, had it been thrown into a nobler sphere of action, the "greatness" would have been less ambiguous.

Audley, as mentioned in the title of his memoir, began with two hundred pounds, and lived to view his mortgages, his statutes, and his judgments so numerous, that it was observed, his papers would have made a good map of England. A con temporary dramatist, who copied from life, has opened the chamber of such an usurer, -perhaps of our Audley

_____" Here lay

A manor bound fast in a skin of parchment,
The wax continuing hard, the acres melting,
Here a sure deed of gift for a market-town,
If not redeem'd this day, which is not in
The unthrift's power; there being scarce one shire
In Wales or England, where my monies are not
Lent out at usury, the certain hook
To draw in more.-

Massinger's City Madam.

This genius of thirty per cent. first had proved the decided vigour of his mind, by his enthusiastic devotion to his law-studies; deprived of the leisure for study through his busy day, he stole the hours from his late nights and his early mornings; and without the means to procure a law-library he invented a method to possess one with out the cost; as fast as he learned, hi taught; and by publishing some usefu tracts on temporary occasions, he was ena bled to purchase a library. He appear never to have read a book without its fur nishing him with some new practical de sign, and he probably studied too much for his own particular advantage. Such devoted studies was the way to become a lord. chancellor; but the science of the law was here subordinate to that of a money-trader.

When yet but a clerk to the clerk in the Counter, frequent opportunities occurred which Audley knew how to improve. He became a money-trader as he had become a law-writer, and the fears and follies c mankind were to furnish him with a trading-capital. The fertility of his genius appeared in expedients and in quick contrivances. He was sure to be the friend of all men falling out. He took a deep concern in the affairs of his master's clients, and often much more than they were aware of. No man so ready at procuring bail or compounding debts. This was a consider

able traffic then, as now. They hired themselves out for bail, swore what was required, and contrived to give false addresses. It seems they dressed themselves out for the occasion: a great seal-ring flamed on the finger, which, however, was pure copper gilt, and they often assumed the name of some person of good credit. Savings, and small presents for gratuitous opinions, often afterwards discovered to be very fallacious ones, enabled him to purchase annuities of easy landholders, with their treble amount secured on their estates. The improvident owners, or the careless heirs, were soon entangled in the usurer's nets; and, after the receipt of a few years, the annuity, by some latent quibble, or some irregularity in the payments, usually ended in Audley's obtaining the treble forfeiture. He could at all times out-knave a knave. One of these incidents has been preserved. A draper, of no honest reputation, being arrested by a merchant for a debt of 2001. Audley bought the debt at 40l., for which the draper immediately offered him 50%. But Audley would not consent, unless the draper indulged a sudden whim of his own: this was a formal contract, that the draper should pay within twenty years, upon twenty certain days, a penny doubled. A knave, in haste to sign, is no calculator; and, as the contemporary dramatist describes one of the arts of those citizens, one part of whose business

was

"To swear and break-they all grow rich by breaking-"

the draper eagerly compounded. He afterwards 66 grew rich. Audley, silently watching his victim, within two years, claims his doubled pennies, every month during twenty months. The pennies had now grown up to pounds. The knave perceived the trick, and preferred paying the forfeiture of his bond for 500l., rather than to receive the visitation of all the little generation of compound interest in the last descendant of 20007., which would have closed with the draper's shop. The inventive genius of Audley might have illustrated that popular tract of his own times, Peacham's" Worth of a Penny; a gentleman who, having scarcely one left, consoled himself by detailing the numerous comforts of life it might procure in the days of Charles II.

Such petty enterprises at length assumed a deeper cast of interest. He formed temporary partnerships with the stewards of country gentlemen. They underlet estates

which they had to manage; and, anticipating the owner's necessities, the estates in due time became cheap purchases for Audley and the stewards. He usually contrived to make the wood pay for the land, which he called "making the feathers pay for the goose." He had, however, such a tenderness of conscience for his victim, that, having plucked the live feathers before he sent the unfledged goose on the common, he would bestow a gratuitous lecture in his own science-teaching the art of making them grow again, by showing how to raise the remaining rents. Audley thus made the tenant furnish at once the means to satisfy his own rapacity, and his employer's necessities. His avarice was not working by a blind, but on an enlight ened principle; for he was only enabling the landlord to obtain what the tenant, with due industry, could afford to give. Adam Smith might have delivered himself in the language of old Audley, so just was his standard of the value of rents. "Under an easy landlord, " said Audley, "a tenant seldom thrives; contenting himself to make the just measure of his rents, and not labouring for any surplusage of estate. Under a hard one, the tenant revenges himself upon the land, and runs away with the rent. I would raise my rents to the present price of all commodities: for if we should let our lands, as other men have done before us, now other wares daily go on in price, we should fall backward in our estates." These axioms of political economy were discoveries in his day.

Audley knew mankind practically, and struck into their humours with the versatility of genius: oracularly deep with the grave, he only stung the lighter mind. When a lord, borrowing money, complained to Audley of his exactions, his lordship exclaimed, "What, do you not intend to use a conscience?" "Yes, I intend hereafter to use it. We monied people must balance accounts: if you do not pay me, you cheat me; but, if you do, then I cheat your lordship." Audley's monied conscience balanced the risk of his lordship's honour, against the probability of his own rapacious profits. When he resided in the Temple among those "pullets without feathers," as an old writer describes the brood, the good man would pule out paternal homilies on improvident youth, grieving that they, under pretence of " learning the law, only learnt to be lawless ;" and "never knew by their own studies the process of an execution, till it was served on themselves." Nor could he fail in his prophecy; for at

the moment that the stoic was enduring their ridicule, his agents were supplying them with the certain means of verifying it; for, as it is quaintly said, he had his decoying as well as his decaying gentlemen. Audley was a philosophical usurer: he never pressed hard for his debts; like the fowler, he never shook his nets lest he might startle, satisfied to have them, without appearing to hold them. With great fondness he compared his "bonds to in fants, which battle best by sleeping." To battle is to be nourished, a term still retained at the university of Oxford. His familiar companions were all subordinate actors in the great piece he was perform ing; he too had his part in the scene. When not taken by surprise, on his table usually lay opened a great Bible, with bishop Andrews's folio sermons, which often gave him an opportunity of railing at the covetousness of the clergy! declaring their religion was "a mere preach;" and that "the time would never be well till we had queen Elizabeth's Protestants again in fashion." He was aware of all the evils arising out of a population beyond the means of subsistence. He dreaded an inundation of men, and considered marriage, with a modern political economist, as very dangerous; bitterly censuring the clergy, whose children, he said, never thrived, and whose widows were left destitute. An apostolical life, according to Audley, required only books, meat, and drink, to be had for fifty pounds a year! Celibacy, voluntary poverty, and all the mortifications of a primitive Christian, were the virtues practised by this puritan among his money bags.

Yet Audley's was that worldly wisdom which derives all its strength from the weaknesses of mankind. Every thing was to be obtained by stratagem, and it was his maxim, that to grasp our object the faster, we must go a little round about it. His life is said to have been one of intricacies and mysteries, using indirect means in all things; but if he walked in a labyrinth, it was to bewilder others; for the clue was still in his own hand; all he sought was that his designs should not be discovered by his actions. His word, we' are told, was his bond; his hour was punctual; and his opinions were compressed and weighty but if he was true to his bond-word, it was only a part of the system to give facility to the carrying on of his trade, for he was not strict to his honour; the pride of victory, as well as the passion for acquisition, combined in the character

of Audley, as in more tremendous conquerors. His partners dreaded the effects of his law-library, and usually relinquished a claim rather than stand a suit against a latent quibble. When one menaced him by showing some money-bags, which he had resolved to empty in law against him, Audley, then in office in the court of wards, with a sarcastic grin, asked, "Whether the bags had any bottom?" "Ay!" replied the exulting possessor, striking them. "In that case I care not," retorted the cynical officer of the court of wards; "for in this court I have a constant spring; and I cannot spend in other courts more than I gain in this." He had at once the meanness which would evade the law, and the spirit which could resist it.

The genius of Audley had crept out of the purlieus of Guildhall, and entered the Temple; and having often sauntered at "Powles" down the great promenade which was reserved for "Duke Humphrey and his guests," he would turn into that part called "The Usurer's Alley," to talk with "Thirty in the hundred," and at length was enabled to purchase his office at that remarkable institution, the court of wards. The entire fortunes of those whom we now call wards in chancery were in the hands. and often submitted to the arts or the tyranny of the officers of this court.

When Audley was asked the value of this new office, he replied, that "It might be worth some thousands of pounds to him who after his death would instantly go to heaven; twice as much to him who would go to purgatory; and nobody knows what to him who would adventure to go to hell." Such was the pious casuistry of a witty usurer. Whether he undertook this last adventure, for his four hundred thousand pounds, how can a sceptical biographer deeide! Audley seems ever to have been weak, when temptation was strong.

Some saving qualities, however, were mixed with the vicious ones he liked best. Another passion divided dominion with the sovereign one: Audley's strongest impres sions of character were cast in the old lawlibrary of his youth, and the pride of legal reputation was not inferior in strength to the rage for money. If in the "court of wards" he pounced on incumbrances which lay on estates, and prowled about to discover the craving wants of their owners, it appears that he also received liberal fees from the relatives of young heirs, to protect them from the rapacity of some great persons, but who could not certainly exceed Audley in subtilty. He was an admirable

lawyer, for he was not satisfied with hearing, but examining his clients; which he called "pinching the cause where he perceived it was foundered." He made two observations on clients and lawyers, which have not lost their poignancy. Many clients, in telling their case, rather plead than relate it, so that the advocate heareth not the true state of it, till opened by the adverse party. Some lawyers seem to keep an assurance-office in their chambers, and will warrant any cause brought unto them, knowing that if they fail, they lose nothing but what was lost long since, their credit."

The career of Audley's ambition closed with the extinction of the" court of wards," by which he incurred the loss of above 100,000. On that occasion he observed, that his ordinary losses were as the shavings of his beard, which only grew the faster by them; but the loss of this place was like the cutting off of a member, which was irrecoverable." The hoary usurer pined at the decline of his genius, discoursed on the vanity of the world, and hinted at retreat. A facetious friend told him a story of an old rat, who having acquainted the young rats that he would at length retire to his hole, desiring none to come near him : their curiosity, after some days, led them to venture to look into the hole; and there they discovered the old rat sitting in the midst of a rich parmesan cheese. It is probable that the loss of the last 100,000l. disturbed his digestion, for he did not long survive his court of wards.

Such was this man, converting wisdom into cunning, invention into trickery, and wit into cynicism. Engaged in no honourable cause, he however showed a mind resolved, making plain the crooked and involved path he trod. Sustine et abstine, to bear and to forbear, was the great principle of Epictetus, and our monied stoic bore all the contempt and hatred of the living smil. ingly, while he forbore all the consolations of our common nature to obtain his end. He died in unblest celibacy.-And thus he received the curses of the living for his rapine, while the stranger who grasped, the million he had raked together, owed him no gratitude at his death.-D'Israeli.

AVARICE.

which sacrifices to the attainment of it every advantage that wealth can give. The first is the exaggeration of a quality, which when not carried to excess is praiseworthy, and is called economy. The other, when indulged in the extreme, produces the effect of a species of prodigality. Where is the great difference between the man who reduces himself to the want of the common necessaries of life, by completing a collection of books, pictures, or medals, and the man who brings himself in effect to the same situation, for the sole end of leaving a precise sum of money to his executors? What signifies whether I starve myself and my family, because I will possess a copper farthing of Otho, or will not part with a golden guinea of king George?

But if there is more foily in one, the other is more likely to be productive of vice. A man who considers wealth as the object of his passion, will hardly refrain from acts of dishonesty when strongly tempted; and yet some of these jackdaw hoarders are men of inviolable integrity.

There are remarkable instances of improvident expenditure by misers on particular occasions. The money-loving Elwes, at his first election for Berkshire, besides opening houses, giving ribbons, and incurring every expense common on those occasions, dispersed guineas and ́halfguineas among the populace, with a profusion as useless as unprecedented.

Perhaps there is no character so seldom to be met with, as that of a man who is strictly reasonable in the value he sets on property-who can be liberal without profusion, and economical without avarice.

ECONOMY.

A rich and parsimonious person, remarkable for having by his will preferred public charities to his relations, was fond of going to the theatre, and taking his great coat with him. But where should he leave this useful appendage during the performance? The box-keepers would expect at least sixpence; and, should he leave it at a coffee-house, he must spend threepence to obtain house-room for it. His invention supplied him with a method cheaper and equally secure. He pledged his garment every evening that he attended the play, at a pawnbrokers, near the door, for a shilling. This sum he carried back at the close of the play, added one penny to it for interest, and received his great coat again safe and sound, as it had literally been laid up in lavender.