178 Notes of the Month on [ Fes. 
honour of his name, but which are not the less costly—a succession of 
dinners in town, a couple of routs a week for his wife’s visitors, and a 
couple of months’ round of “ particular friends” at his villa in the shooting 
season, with a subscription to the nearest hounds, if he does not keep a 
pack of his own—are the earliest furnishing of a modern banker. To this 
there are, of course, exceptions. But the race of the Fauntleroys is not 
yet extinct ; and those gentlemen of Grecian villas, and various esta- 
blishments, are still a tolerably numerous body. In all this it is to be 
recollected, that they are figuring on the property of others, and that, in 
nine instances out of ten, they are figuring beyond it, and rich in a 
capital in the clouds. ' 
This fact is so well known, that the principle has actually been 
stated, and not by Mr. MacCulloch, but by persons supposed to be men 
of sense, that a banker cannot be expected to confine his speculations to 
his bond fide means. The consequence is, that, on the first attempt at 
the resumption of the property deposited with him, the showy personage 
breaks down—takes the first skiff for France or America—or heroically 
comes forward to stand the brunt of the Commission Court, and offer 
his creditors, in return for their confidence, sixpence in the pound. 
How widely this ruin must extend—what pittances of widows and 
children, old persons and struggling familles, are swallowed up in this 
wreck—every man can conjecture ; and it is the villas and the hounds, 
the palace at the west end, and the twelve horses in the stable, that have 
done this. For the trade of banking is a good one ; its expenditure is the 
slightest, and its profit the most secure, ready, and undiminished in the 
return, of any trade. It is the rage for living like nobles, the emulation 
of the shew of high life, the presumed necessity of keeping up to the 
established rank of “ bankers,” that precipitates the ruin. 
Another result of these fine conceptions, is negligence in their shops. 
The villa-keeping gentleman, loaded with the delightful employments of 
his west-end and rural existence, visits his bank merely as a novelty—a 
pleasant half-hour’s délassement—and thus come the clerks into play. 
These gentlemen also see too much of the glory of the banking life, not 
to feel their fingers a little excited towards the means in their possession. 
They have their villas too, their cabriolets, and perhaps their curricles ; 
they falsify their accounts, and when they have got all that they can — 
conveniently carry away, they carry it away. The senior partner has 
been at his villa, entertaining a duke during the pheasant season ; the 
second has been canvassing a knot of Scotch burghs ; the junior partner, 
who had been left to wield the sceptre, and who knows no more of busi- 
ness than his worthy seniors care for it, finding his time heavy on his 
hands in the compting-house, has gone for a week to Brighton, or has 
kept an appointment at Bath, or has a bet on the St. Leger, and likes 
to see how matters are going on at the course. As no man can be in two 
places at once, his presence is not likely to disarrange his clerk’s plans, 
who, finding the coast clear, puts fifty thousand pounds in his pocket, | 
puts on his hat, and drives to Dover in a chaise and four, leaving the — 
partners the pleasure of being very much surprised, of returning to town 
by express, and of discovering, to their infinite astonishment, that their 
fugitive clerk had been cheating them to their teeth for the last ten 
years. 
Now a vast deal of this foolery would be avoided, if the banker-gene- 
ration did net think it incumbent on them to figure as first-rate person- 
teins ™ 
