ed without mercy by extortioners whose
demands grew even more rapidly than the money shrank. The price of
the necessaries of life, of shoes, of ale, of oatmeal, rose fast. The
labourer found that the bit of metal which when he received it was
called a shilling would hardly, when he wanted to purchase a pot of beer
or a loaf of rye bread, go as far as sixpence. Where artisans of more
than usual intelligence were collected together in great numbers, as in
the dockyard at Chatham, they were able to make their complaints heard
and to obtain some redress. [638] But the ignorant and helpless peasant
was cruelly ground between one class which would give money only by
tale and another which would take it only by weight. Yet his sufferings
hardly exceeded those of the unfortunate race of authors. Of the way in
which obscure writers were treated we may easily form a judgment from
the letters, still extant, of Dryden to his bookseller Tonson. One day
Tonson sends forty brass shillings, to say nothing of clipped money.
Another day he pays a debt with pieces so bad that none of them will go.
The great poet sends them all back, and demands in their place guineas
at twenty-nine shillings each. "I expect," he says in one letter, "good
silver, not such as I have had formerly." "If you have any silver that
will go," he says in another letter, "my wife will be glad of it. I lost
thirty shillings or more by the last payment of fifty pounds." These
complaints and demands, which have been preserved from destruction only
by the eminence of the writer, are doubtless merely a fair sample of the
correspondence which filled all the mail bags of England during several
months.

In the midst of the public distress one class prospered greatly, the
bankers; and among the bankers none could in skill or in luck bear a
comparison with Charles Duncombe. He had been, not many years before, a
goldsmith of very moderate wealth. He had probably, after the fashion of
his craft, plied for customers under the arcades of the Royal Exchange,
had saluted merchants with profound bows, and had begged to be allowed
the honour of keeping their cash. But so dexterously did he now avail
himself of the opportunities of profit which the general confusion of
prices gave to a moneychanger, that, at the moment when the trade of
the kingdom was depressed to the lowest point, he laid down near ninety
thousand pounds for the estate of Helmsley in the North Riding of
Yorkshire. T