Two hundred years ago, when John Law, a rich goldsmith's son, was a boy in Edinburgh, goldsmiths were dealers in coin as well as in plate, and hence were bankers and brokers as well as manufacturers. They borrowed, lent, exchanged, and assayed money, and therefore possessed whatever knowledge of finance there was current in the world. It was in his father's counting-room that John Law acquired that taste for financial theories and combinations which distinguished him even in his youth. But the sagacious and practical goldsmith died when his son was fourteen, and left him a large inheritance in land and money. The example of Louis XIV. and Charles II. having brought the low vices into high fashion throughout Europe, it is not surprising that Law's first notoriety should have been owing to a duel about a mistress. A man of fashion in Europe in Louis XIV.'s time was a creature gorgeously attired in lace and velvet, and hung about with ringlets made of horse-hair, who passed his days in showing the world how much there was in him of the goat, the monkey, and the pig. Law had the impudence to establish his mistress in a respectable lodging-house, which led to his being challenged by a gentleman who had a sister living there. Law killed his man on the field--"not fairly," as John Evelyn records--and he was convicted of murder. The king pardoned, but detained him in prison, from which he escaped, went to the Continent, and resumed his career, being at once a man of fashion, a gambler, and a connoisseur in finance. He used to attend card-parties, followed by a footman carrying two bags, each containing two thousand louis-d'ors, and once during the life-time of the old king he was ordered out of Paris on the ground that he "understood the games he had introduced into the capital _too well_."