in counting-houses, where no insurances were taken, but to which
books were carried, as well as from the different offices in
every part of the town, as from the _Morocco-men_, who went from
door to door taking insurances and enticing the poor and middling
ranks to adventure.

It was gambling, and not the burdens of the long war, nor the
revulsion from war to peace, that made so many bankruptcies
in the few years succeeding the Battle of Waterloo. It was the
plunderers at gaming tables that filled the gazettes and made the
gaols overflow with so many victims.

A foreigner has advanced an opinion as to the source of the
gambling propensity of Englishmen. `The English,' says M.
Dunne,[68] `the most speculative nation on earth, calculate even
upon future contingences. Nowhere else is the adventurous rage
for stock-jobbing carried on to so great an extent. The fury of
gambling, so common in England, is undoubtedly a daughter of this
speculative genius. The _Greeks_ of Great Britain are, however,
much inferior to those of France in cunning and industry. A
certain Frenchman who assumed in London the title and manners of
a baron, has been known to surpass all the most dexterous rogues
of the three kingdoms in the art of robbing. His aide-de-camp
was a kind of German captain, or rather _chevalier d'industrie_,
a person who had acted the double character of a French spy and
an English officer at the same time. Their tactics being at
length discovered, the baron was obliged to quit the country;
and he is said to have afterwards entered the monastery of
La Trappe,' where doubtless, in the severe and gloomy religious
practices of that terrible penitentiary, he atoned for his past