persuade ignorant people that the dividends
could not fall short of twenty per cent., and to part with five thousand
pounds of this imaginary wealth for ten thousand solid guineas, than to
load a ship with a well chosen cargo for Virginia or the Levant. Every
day some new bubble was puffed into existence, rose buoyant, shone
bright, burst, and was forgotten. [368]

The new form which covetousness had taken furnished the comic poets
and satirists with an excellent subject; nor was that subject the
less welcome to them because some of the most unscrupulous and most
successful of the new race of gamesters were men in sad coloured clothes
and lank hair, men who called cards the Devil's books, men who thought
it a sin and a scandal to win or lose twopence over a backgammon board.
It was in the last drama of Shadwell that the hypocrisy and knavery of
these speculators was, for the first time, exposed to public ridicule.
He died in November 1692, just before his Stockjobbers came on the
stage; and the epilogue was spoken by an actor dressed in deep mourning.
The best scene is that in which four or five stern Nonconformists,
clad in the full Puritan costume, after discussing the prospects of
the Mousetrap Company and the Fleakilling Company, examine the question
whether the godly may lawfully hold stock in a Company for bringing over
Chinese ropedancers. "Considerable men have shares," says one austere
person in cropped hair and bands; "but verily I question whether it
be lawful or not." These doubts are removed by a stout old Roundhead
colonel who had fought at Marston Moor, and who reminds his weaker
brother that the saints need not themselves see the ropedancing, and
that, in all probability, there will be no ropedancing to see. "The
thing," he says, "is like to take; the shares will sell well; and then
we shall not care whether the dancers come over or no." It is important
to observe that this scene was exhibited and applauded before one
farthing of the national debt had been contracted. So ill informed were
the numerous writers who, at a later period, ascribed to the national
debt the existence of stockjobbing and of all the immoralities connected
with stockjobbing. The truth is that society had, in the natural course
of its growth, reached a point at which it was inevitable that there
should be stockjobbing whether there were a national debt or not, and
inevitable also that, if there were a long and costly war, there shoul