by sleeping;" to battle,
is to be nourished--a term still retained in the battle-book of the
university. I have elsewhere preserved the character and habits of the
money-dealer in the age of James I.--See "Curiosities of Literature," 11th
Edit. p. 228.]

[Footnote D: It is observed, in the same life, that his mortgages, and
statutes, and his judgments were so numerous, that his papers would have
made a good map of England. A view of the chamber of this usurer is
preserved by Massinger, who can only be understood by the modern reader in
Mr. Gifford's edition:--

Here lay
A manor, bound fast in a skin of parchment;
Here a sure deed of gift for a market-town,
If not redeem'd this day, which is not in
The unthrift's purse; there being scarce one shire
In Wales or England, where my monies are not
Lent out at usury, the certain hook
To draw in more.

MASSINGER'S _City Madam_.]

This crushing usury seemed to them a real calamity; for although in the
present extraordinary age of calculations and artificial wealth, we can
suffer "a dunghill-breed of men," like Mompesson and his contemptible
partner of this reign, to accumulate in a rapid period more than a ducal
fortune, without any apparent injury to the public welfare, the result was
different then; the legitimate and enlarged principles of commerce were
not practised by our citizens in the first era of their prosperity; their
absorbing avarice rapidly took in all the exhausting prodigality of the
gentry, who were pushed back on the people to prey in their turn on them;
those who found their own acres disappearing, became enclosers of commons;
this is one of the grievances which Massinger notices, while the writer of
the "Five Years of King James" tells us that these discontents between the
gentry and the commonalty grew out into a petty rebellion; and it appears
by Peyton that "divers of the people were hanged up."

* * * * *

ANECDOTES OF THE MANNERS OF THE AGE.

The minute picture of the domestic manners of this age exhibits the
results of those extremes of prodigality and avarice which struck
observers in that contracted circle which then constituted society. The
king's prodigal dispensations of honours and titles seem at first to have
been political; for James was a foreigner, and designed to create a
nobility, as likewise an inferior order, wh