a dinner; complaints and imprecations resounded on every side; some,
utterly ruined, killed themselves in despair; and mysterious rumors of
popular risings spread throughout Paris the terror of another expected
St. Bartholomew.

In this case the phenomena were the more striking because they were
gathered within a short compass of time, and took place among a people
proverbial for the versatility and extravagance of their impressions.
The French are an excitable race, who carry whatever they do or suffer
to the last extreme of theatrical effect; and for that reason it might
be supposed that the tremendous revulsions we have alluded to were owing
in part to national temperament. But similar effects have been wrought,
by similar causes, among the slower and cooler English, with whom
commercial disturbances have been as numerous and as disastrous as among
the French, only that they have been distributed over wider spaces of
time, and controlled by the more sluggish and conservative habits of the
nation. Some twenty years before Law made his approaches to the French
Regent, another Scotchman, William Patterson, had got the ear of
Macaulay's hero, William, and of his ministers, and laid the foundations
of the great Bank of England. It was chartered in 1694, on advances made
to the government; and gradually, under its auspices, the vast system of
English banking, which gives tone to that of the world, grew up. Let us
see with what results; they may be expressed in a few words: every ten
or fifteen years, a terrific commercial overturn, with intermediate
epochs of speculation, panic, and bankruptcy.

We cannot here go into a history of this bank, nor of the various causes
of its reverses; but we select from a brief chronological table, in its
own words, some of the principal events, which are also the events of
British trade and finance.