Selected Essays of Lamb (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SELECTED ESSAYS OF LAMB I. THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE Reader, in thy passage from the Bank?where thou Bast been receiving thy half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean annuitant like myself)?to the Flower Pot, to secure a place for Dalston, or Shackle- well, or some other thy suburban retreat northerly,? 5 didst thou never observe a melancholy-looking, handsome, brick and stone edifice, to the left?where Thread- needle Street abuts upon Bishopsgate? I daresay thou hast often admired its magnificent portals ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with clois- 10 ' ters, and pillars, with few or no traces of goers-in or comers-out?a desolation something like Balclutha's. This was once a house of trade,?a center of busy interests. The throng of merchants was here?the quick pulse of gain?and here some forms of business are 15 still kept up, though the soul be long since fled. Here are still to be seen stately porticoes; imposing staircases; offices roomy as the state apartments in palaces ?deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling clerks; the still more sacred interiors of court and 20 committee-rooms, with venerable faces of beadles, doorkeepers?directors seated in form on solemn days (to 1. the Bank: the Bank of England, Threadneedle Street, London. 4. the Flower Pot: an old inn near the South-Sea House, from which the coaches started. proclaim a dead dividend), at long worm-eaten tables, that have been mahogany, with tarnished gilt-leather coverings, supporting massy silver inkstands long since dry;?the oaken wainscots hung with pictures of de- 5 ceased governors and sub-governors, of Queen Anne, and the two first monarchs of the Brunswick dynasty; ?huge charts, which subsequent discoveries have antiquated ;?dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams,...