and chased away the Hours of Night. At the back, an arcade fermée opened, and the king himself appeared, dressed as the Sun, and wearing the cordon bleu over his coat of rays-Glory behind him, and the Muses and Graces on his right and left. The Gloomy Hours fell upon their knees before the Great Cause of Light, Heat, and Vegetation, and the admiring court formed an industrious claque. By this allegorical arrangement, Louis kindly complimented Nature, and decorated the Sun. His favourites fooled their 'demi-dieu' to the top of his bent. Clouds were shaped like camels, weasels, and whales, if he thought So. Nay, an if he chose, they were camels, weasels, and whales, whales spouting verses in his honour.

No river is spanned by so many beautiful bridges as the sparkling Seine; no flood washes the banks of so many royal residences. Close to magnificent Versailles, arid, glaring, white, and stony on the one side, as green and glassy on the other, is St. Cloud, with its snug château, and cool, umbrageous Parc. Versailles is to St. Cloud what Windsor is to Osborne. Versailles is for receptions, levees, ambassadorial compliments, state balls, and pageants. St. Cloud is a royal home, where royalty may hide, domestic and unseen. Its deserted alleys, lonely walks, and solitary glades speak with a mournful hush of past grandeurs and present neglect.

It has but one sign of interest in the new Paris of 1864: Near the famous cascade is planted, in proud scarlet, green and yellow lustre, a roundabout. For a small sum, the lieges of the Emperor may turn and turn and turn again, and still go on to the music of an organ. This is the only concession mossy, velvety, leafy, lovely, old St. Cloud makes to the modern appetite for ignoble amusement.

By the borders of the silver Seine, as we have said, palaces are as plentiful as turnpikes near the Thames, and the approaches to them are so delightful that it is strange the equestrian and vehicular classes do not pass more of their time in the saddle or on the box; but, despite

the Emperor's patronage of races, the French will never be a 'hossy' or a 'trappy' people. They have more in their environs to tempt them than poor Londoners. There is St. Germain, with its triple attraction of town, château, and forest; St. Denis, for those who wish to be severely and sepulchrally historical, and find a pleasure in the end of a drive that permits them to see the famous caveaux where royal corpses are classed chronologically, from Clovis to Louis the Eighteenth. There is Neuilly, with its blackened ruins-a recollection of the revolution of '48; Montmorency, fresh, fertile, and delicious, with its valley, lake, and literary memories of JeanJacques Rousseau; Fontainebleau, where the first Napoleon made his adieux to his Guard: and here again we may quote the Chronicle of the Drum:

He called for our old battle standard, One kiss to the eagle he gave, "Dear eagle," he said, "may this kiss Long sound in the hearts of the brave!" 'Twas thus that Napoleon left us,

Our people were weeping and mute, As he passed through the lines of his guard, And our drums beat the notes of salute.'

We defy even the British tourist-and for flesh and blood he is moderately impassive-to stand in the Cour du Cheval Blanc, and not feel that in France the cocked-hat is a representative institution.

By the side of every road that leads from Paris, there is a sight that we do not find in our Own suburbs. The broad well-kept path is provided with seats, whereon congregate comfortable-looking bonnes, round whom cluster children of all ages, from the infant of two months to the comparatively elderly young lady and gentleman of six years. The bonnes have an especially maternal manner and appear

ance.

Black of eye, brown of tint, broad of shoulder, and kind of tongue, they are the centre of that domestic solar system, round which toddle and tumble in eccentric orbits those wondrous planets, little children. Nowhere can be found a pleasanter picture than a family group of that lively people, so erro

neously supposed to hold domestic ties in disregard. Three generations of the same blood, with the bonne as a connecting link, will sit beneath the shade of trees, and talk, and laugh, and amuse each other, with a feeling of home enjoyment that we, in this colder climate, think inseparable from the fireside. There will be madame the grandmother, tending the youngest born but one; madame the mother knitting, her eldest son watching her black eyes with a pair of visual organs of exactly the same pattern and colour, and thinking what a wonderful person is 'maman,' and how, as soon he grows up, he means to marry her, in order to have her always by his side. The bonne holds the latest arrival, and now and then the mother takes her eyes from off her needles to feast them with a sight of her sleeping child. A few yards further on, a grandfather will conduct his little granddaughter by the hand -the child an infinitely graver person than her grandsire, for it is a strange thing that in France, where adults are lively, children are sombre even in their play. When they dig up sand with little wooden spades, they dig not as digs the British urchin, for the sake of worms, or to break the spade, or make a letter, but with the gravity of a geologist, and the intensity of purpose of a digger. Perhaps they dig, as the nation fights-for an idea!

In Paris, says a modern social proverb, Il n'y a que des vieux qui sont jeunes, et des jeunes qui sont vieux; and certainly men on the other side of forty-five are more agreeable than the young fellows who affect the English manner, and engraft the eyeglass of to-day upon the stick-up collar of fifteen years ago. Hippolyte, Auguste, and Edouard must learn to play as boisterously as Jack, Tom, and Harry, to wear out the knees of their trousers with as much facility, to be as unconscious of their neckerchiefs, and as indifferent to wet feet. At the same time, Jack, Tom, and Harry may derive some excellent hints from Hippolyte, Auguste, and Edouard. They may be more submissive to their elders, less sheepish before strangers, and not so addicted to throwing stones. The high tone of our public schools has abolished the cat-skinning, frog-pelting, and dog-tormenting villany of former days, and we hope to see our best sort of boys perfect little Bayards, as gentle as courageous, and as amiable as determined.

Adieu, or rather, à bientôt, charming high roads round Paris! By your own population, your delightful views, crisp houses, beautiful air and blossom-scented breezes are neglected for the lazy cushions, hot oil, and engine smoke of the luxurious railway.

T. W. R.

A paper entitled The Favourites of Fortune; or, The Greshams,' appeared in 'London Society' for November, 1862. 'For the completeness of the present series of sketches it is necessary that the subject

VOL. V.-NO. XXX.

should be treated again; but in doing so we have here spoken as briefly as possible of the incidents there detailed, and drawn our illustrations from comparatively new

sources.

2 G

ton, Lord Chancellor of England, in his opening address to Henry VII.'s first Parliament, assembled in November, 1487-because it is the King's desire that this peace, wherein he hopeth to govern and maintain you, do not bear only unto you leaves for you to sit under the shade of them in safety, but also should bear you fruit of riches, wealth, and plenty, therefore his Grace prays you to take into consideration matters of trade, as also the manufactures of the kingdom, and to repress the bastard and barren employment of moneys to usury and unlawful exchanges, that they may be, as their natural use is, turned upon commerce and lawful and royal trading.' That advice, excellent in the main, and coinciding exactly with the temperament of the people to whom it was addressed, found plenty of followers. Englishmen had learnt from the example of such men as William de la Pole and Richard Whittington that commerce, wisely pursued, could not fail to bring honour and wealth, both to each individual trader and to the nation at large; and as soon as the firm rule of the Tudors was established they applied themselves to it with notable zeal. The miserable period of the Wars of the Roses, if it did nothing else, served to rid the country of many restrictions introduced in the age of feudalism, and to make fresh room for the development of free thought and independent action. The supremacy of the barons was brought to an end, and the supremacy of the towns-that is, of the merchants and manufacturers who made the strength and wealth of towns-initiated. Many causes led to this result. Under any government, the commercial spirit would have shown itself in unprecedented force, but in no way, perhaps, could it have received much greater encouragement than from the prudent and energetic government of Henry VII. and his successors. The example of foreign adventurers, moreover, the seamen who opened the way to India, Southern Africa, and America, and the traders who followed in their track and turned

had a marked effect on English trade.

Englishmen, however, now foremost in the dominion of the sea and possessors of by far the greatest portion of colonial wealth, were behindhand in the race of maritime enterprise led by Columbus and Vasco de Gama. For a time, the merchants who stayed at home, or, at any rate, within the long-established boundaries of European trade, took precedence of the merchants who went far away to find new sources of wealth, and to use them in new methods. Hence the Greshams, representatives of Tudor domestic commerce at its noblest, claim our notice before the Hawkinses, whose history will show us something of the way in which our colonial empire began.

The Greshams are first found in Norfolk. John Gresham, gentleman, of Gresham, lived in the latter part of the fourteenth century, and inherited a respectable patrimony from ancestors who seem to have given their name to the district.* James Gresham, his son, was a lawyer, living chiefly in London, in attendance at King's Bench in 1443, and apparently a clerk or secretary to Sir William Paston, the judge, whose cause in the civil war he zealously espoused between 1443 and 1471. He became lord of the manor of East Beckham, and transferred the family seat from Gresham to Holt, a bleak and desolate spot on the northern shore of Norfolk, about four miles from the sea. It is likely that in his later years he was something of a merchant, the neighbouring towns, full of Flemish settlers and convenient for intercourse with the coast towns of Flanders, being well adapted for amateur commerce. Certain it is, at any rate, that, whereas of his son John we know nothing but that he married a rich wife, his four grandsons were brought up to trade, having London for their headquarters.

These grandsons, all living in the time of Henry VII. and Henry VIII., were William, Thomas, Richard, and

* See Table of Descent, p. 451.

John.* William, the eldest, is not much known to us. He was a mercer and merchant adventurer of London, and a freeman of the Mercers' Company, but he seems to have lived often at the family mansion, and also to have resided much abroad, besides making journeys in pursuit of his calling. 'It appears,' says Hakluyt, 'out of certain ancient ledgers of Master John Gresham, that between the years 1511 and 1534 many English ships traded to the Levant,' among them 'the "Mary George," wherein was factor William Gresham;' and we find that in 1533 he was appointed governor of the English merchants resident at Antwerp. Thomas was also a merchant trading to the chief towns of the Mediterranean; but being frightened by a ghost story, he gave up business at an early age and became a priest. The commercial interests of England were to be chiefly served by the two younger brothers, Richard and John.

Both were brought up in London as apprentices to Mr. John Middleton, mercer and merchant of the staple at Calais, of whose famous kindred we shall see more hereafter. Richard was admitted to the freedom of the Mercers' Company in 1507, John in 1517. Both strove well from the beginning-the elder brother finding his interest in residing for the most part in London and going occasionally to Antwerp and

the other near trading towns on the Continent, while the younger chose a line of business that took him oftener and farther from home. Thus we find that in 1531, while Richard was serving as sheriff of the City of London, John was busy in the Mediterranean. At the island of Scio he hired a Portuguese vessel and filled it with goods to be conveyed to England; but the owner and master of the ship took it instead to his own country, and there disposed of the cargo, worth twelve thousand ducats, on his own account. The theft was brought under the notice of Henry VIII., who wrote an angry complaint to the King of Portugal; but the value of the merchandize does not seem to have been restored. That John Gresham had influence enough to obtain his sovereign's help in this matter, however, shows him to have been already a man of mark. In 1537 he was living in London, and acting as sheriff, his brother being promoted to the office of Lord Mayor at the same time, and both being honoured with knighthood on the occasion of their election. This year, 1537, was a memorable one in London history. Sir Richard Gresham, as chief magistrate, petitioned the King, 'for the aid and comfort of the poor, sick, blind, aged, and impotent persons, being not able to help themselves nor having no place certain where they may be refreshed