Wealth rapidly acquired has been invariably detrimental to the manners and the morals of the nation, and in 1692 the rule was as absolute as now. The moneyed interest, intoxicated by the possession of wealth which their wildest dreams had never imagined, and incensed by the cold contempt with which the landed interest treated them, endeavoured to rival the latter in that magnificence which was one characteristic of the landed families. Their carriages were radiant with gold; their persons were radiant with gems; they married the poorer branches of the nobility; they eagerly purchased the princely mansions of the old aristocracy. The brush of Sir Godfrey Kneller, and the chisel of Caius Cibber, were employed in perpetuating their features. Their wealth was rarely grudged to humble the pride of a Howard or a Cavendish; and the money gained by the father was spent by the son in acquiring a distinction at the expense of decency. They were seized upon by the satirist and the dramatist as a new object of ridicule; and under various forms they have become a stage property. The term which they had chosen to distinguish them became a word of contempt; and the moneyed class was at once the envy and the laugh of the town. Nor was it until that interest became a great and most important one, that the term assumed its right meaning, or that the moneyed contended with the landed interest on a more than equal footing. The former have always clung to the house of Brunswick; the latter have often used their exertions against it. In time, however, the moneyed became a landed interest, and vied in taste as well as magnificence with the proudest of England’s old nobility. Among these was Sir Robert Clayton, director of the Bank, whose banqueting-room was wainscoted with cedar, whose villa was the boast of the Surrey hills, whose entertainments imitated those of kings, whose judicious munificence made him the pride of that great city to the representation of which he was called by acclamation. But there were other and less reputable directors of the great Bank; and a pamphlet, published shortly afterwards, drew public attention to acts which either prove that morality in one commercial age is immorality in the next, or that some of the governors of the corporation were wofully deficient in the organ of conscientiousness.