SPANISH LOANS. 191 



while, as the vampire fans with refreshing coolness the sleeping 

 prey, whose heart's blood it is voraciously draining. 



The practical lessons which 1823 and the panic of June last in 

 the money market afford, are beacons, whose warnings should not be 

 disregarded ; they who require signs more portentous of the future 

 would not be satisfied though one rose from the dead. The descent, 

 in a few days only, of Spanish paper from seventy to thirty-five, is a 

 recent and truth-telling developement of the facilis descensas averni, 

 as applied to Spanish loans, or rather of their natural tendency, 

 when unacted upon by the force or fraud of capitalists and jobbers, 

 to find their proper level. Amidst the concern which we must feel 

 for the victims of good faith and unsuspecting confidence on that 

 fatal occasion, it is a consolation to know that some of the original 

 plotters have likewise been victimized by their own overreaching, 

 or, entangled in the meshes, perchance, of more potent beasts of 

 prey. The conspiracy is not for all that abandoned ; the Sisyphean 

 task of rolling the cumbrous mass of bond-debt upwards has, we 

 perceive, recommenced. All manner of help is pressed into the 

 service of the fainting, fear-stricken labourers. The Quixotic mis- 

 sion of the gallant de Lacy Evans, trumpeted forth as it was, ope- 

 rated, however, upon the disconsolate stock-jobbers no more than 

 would a charge sounded from a penny trumpet, upon the Anglo- 

 Spanish dragoons, that are to be, of Colonel Kinlock. The disinter- 

 ested Ricardos, &c., protocolized Lord Palmerston, and his lordship 

 protocolled gallantly in reply, in vain; the million found subscribed 

 upon paper, and advertized in the daily papers, was powerless in 

 behalf of Spanish paper. The hour of extreme unction seemed at 

 hand, when the death of one man saved not a state only, but 

 Spanish bonds and coupons, debt active, deferred, and passive, with 

 all that thereupon fatten. The leaden messenger which struck Zu- 

 malacarraguy was doubtless the identical weight which held down 

 scrip, newly installed, and vales consolidados ; as his wound festered 

 so the bonds prospered ; the fever which enfeebled the frame of the 

 hero revivified the rotten carcase of the stock house; Zumalacarra- 

 guy died, and the surgeon who excised ball and life together, injected 

 by the very process a new life and life's blood into the corpus de- 

 functus of Capel Court. The cauldron began to bubble again, al- 

 though not yet at boiling heat; auxiliary ingredients were, ever and 

 anon, thrown in by the weird enchanters, whose occupation it is to 

 transmute paper into gold for their own use, and at other folks' cost. 

 Toreno, the sworn ally of the Stock Exchange, became a premier 

 that was one left ; Senor Mendizabal was nominated to be his fag, 

 or Secretario de Hacienda a very master-stroke of policy. He 

 who had wonders worked for the funds of Portugal he who had 

 shut up her six per cents, to par, and then with his magic wand had 

 transmuted them into threes of baser metal what could not he 

 achieve for the dolorous fives of Spain ? So reasoned the gentlefolk 

 of the Alley but the public heeded not. Nevertheless, Spanish loans 

 commenced creeping on, stealthily and timidly however ; the busi- 

 ness is, as we trust the business will remain, all among the money- 

 changers of the temple in Bartholomew-lane, a mere matter of rou- 



