as raised in Amsterdam,
but the judges unanimously refused to interfere, on the ground that debts
contracted in gambling were no debts in law.

Thus the matter rested. To find a remedy was beyond the power of the
government. Those who were unlucky enough to have had stores of tulips on
hand at the time of the sudden reaction were left to bear their ruin as
philosophically as they could; those who had made profits were allowed to
keep them; but the commerce of the country suffered a severe shock, from
which it was many years ere it recovered.

The example of the Dutch was imitated to some extent in England. In the
year 1636 tulips were publicly sold in the Exchange of London, and the
jobbers exerted themselves to the utmost to raise them to the fictitious
value they had acquired in Amsterdam. In Paris also the jobbers strove to
create a tulipomania. In both cities they only partially succeeded.
However, the force of example brought the flowers into great favour, and
amongst a certain class of people tulips have ever since been prized more
highly than any other flowers of the field. The Dutch are still notorious
for their partiality to them, and continue to pay higher prices for them
than any other people. As the rich Englishman boasts of his fine
race-horses or his old pictures, so does the wealthy Dutchman vaunt him of
his tulips.

In England, in our day, strange as it may appear, a tulip will produce
more money than an oak. If one could be found, _rara in terris_, and black
as the black swan of Juvenal, its price would equal that of a dozen acres
of standing corn. In Scotland, towards the close of the seventeenth
century, the highest price for tulips, according to the authority of a
writer in the supplement to the third edition of the _Encyclopedia
Britannica_, was ten guineas. Their value appears to have diminished from
that time till the year 1769, when the two most valuable species in
England were the _Don Quevedo_ and the _Valentinier_, the former of which
was worth two guineas and the latter two guineas and a half. These prices
appear to have been the minimum. In the year 1800, a common price was
fifteen guineas for a single bulb. In 1835, a bulb of the species called
the Miss Fanny Kemble was sold by public auction in London for
seventy-five pounds. Still more remarkable was the price of a tulip in the
possession of a gardener in the King's Road, Chelsea;--in his catalogues
it was labelled at two hundred guinea