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 spoke of the past:--the
shade of some dead accountant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit
by me, stiff as in life. Living accounts and accountants puzzle
me. I have no skill in figuring. But thy great dead tomes, which
scarce three degenerate clerks of the present day could lift from
their enshrining shelves--with their old fantastic flourishes, and
decorative rubric interlacings--their sums in triple columniations,
set down with formal superfluity of cyphers--with pious sentences at
the beginning, without which our religious ancestors never ventured to
open a book of business, or bill of lading--the costly vellum covers
of some of them almost persuading us that we are got into some _better
library_,--are very agreeable and edifying spectacles. I can look
upon these defunct dragons with complacency. Thy heavy odd-shaped
ivory-handled penknives (our ancestors had every thing on a larger
scale than we have hearts for) are as good as any thing from
Herculaneum. The pounce-boxes of our days have gone retrograde.

The very clerks which I remember in the South-Sea House--I speak of
forty years back--had an air very different from those in the public
offices that I have had to do with since. They partook of the genius
of the place!