106 BothscMld. [February, 



beyond the earth. The stars still glisten in the firmament, but their 

 brilliancy is dimmed. The beauty of the deep polar star, so often and 

 so justly praised, disappears in the dense atmosphere which the intensity 

 of the cold produces." 



■4 * ♦ ♦ » 



BOTHSCHILD. 



The insufficiency of mere wealth alone to confer happiness is strikingly 

 illustrated in the life of Nathan Myers Kothschild, the Jew, who died 

 in London some years ago, " one of the most devoted worshipers that 

 ever laid a withered soul on the altar of Mammon." For years he 

 wielded the purse of the world, opening and closing it to kings and 

 emperors as he listed ; and, upon certain occasions, was supposed to have 

 more influence in Great Britain than the proudest and wealthiest of its 



nobles perhaps more influence than the Houses of Parliament taken 



together. He once purchased bills of the government, in a single day, 

 to the amount of $20,000,000, and also the gold which he knew the 

 government must have to pay them ; and with the profits on a single 

 loan, purchased an estate which cost him $750,000. But, with the 

 clearest and widest comprehension in money matters, with the most 

 piercing insight into all the possible efi'ecting causes in the money mar- 

 ket, and with ingenuity to efi'ect the profoundest, most subtle, and most 

 unsuspected combination — an ingenunity before which all the other 

 prodigies of calculation that have, from time to time, appeared, sink into 

 nothing — he was, withal, a little soul. He exercised his talents and 

 calculating powers, not only for the accumulation of millions, and the 

 management of national creditors, but also for the determination of the 

 smallest possible pittance on which a clerk's soul could be retained in 

 connection with his body. To part with a shilling in the way of charity 

 cut him to the heart. One of his grand rules, '^ Never to have anything 

 to do with an unlucky man or place," which was also one of John Jacob 

 Aster's principles, however shrewd in a worldly point of view, was the 

 very quintessence of selfishness and Mammonism. He was, in short, a 

 thorough-going Mammon-worshiper — his whole soul converted into a 

 machine or engine for coining guineas, and every noble emotion, immor- 

 tal longing, dead within him. Guineas he did coin, to a sum that seems 

 almost fabulous ; but, with all his colossal wealth, he was profoundly 

 unhappy; and, with sorrowful earnestness, once exclaimed to one con- 

 gratulating him on the gorgeous magnificence of his palatial mansion, 

 and thence inferring that he was happy: ''Hai^pyf me ha_ppyf " 



