His principal dealings were in those tickets with which, from the time of the second Charles, the seamen had been remunerated. After years of great endurance and of greater labor, the defenders of the land were paid with inconvertible paper, and the seamen—too often improvident—were compelled to part with their wages at any discount which the conscience of the usurer would offer. Men who had gone the round of the world, like Drake, or had fought hand to hand with Tromp, were unable to compete with the keen agent of the usurer, who, decoying them into the low haunts of Rotherhithe, purchased their tickets at the lowest possible price; and skilled seamen, the glory of England’s navy, were thus robbed, and ruined, and compelled to transfer their services to foreign states. In these tickets did Thomas Guy deal; and on the wrongs of these men was the vast superstructure of his fortune reared. But jobbing in them was as frequent in the high places of England as in ’Change Alley. The seaman was poor and uninfluential, and the orders which were refused payment to him were paid to the wealthy jobber, who parted with some of his plunder as a premium to the treasury to disgorge the remainder. By these means, and by fortunate speculations during the South-Sea bubble, Mr. Guy realized a fortune of £500,000. It must be borne in mind, that, a century and a quarter ago, half a million was almost a fabulous fortune. It was only to be acquired by speculation in the funds, and by ventures which merely commercial dealings failed to produce. In the literature of the past century, a “plum” is mentioned as the great prize of a lifetime, and as the extent of mercantile ambition. The enormous sums lately realized were then almost unknown, or arose from some chivalrous adventure, such as marked the lives of a Robert Clive or a Warren Hastings; and it was left for the present century to witness the achievement of fortunes which in the past would have been beyond credence. In attaining so great a result, Mr. Guy was doubtless assisted by his penurious habits; but he did not possess a penurious mind. The endower of a princely charity, the founder of alms-houses, the enricher of Christ’s Hospital, the support of his relations, and the friend of the poor, must be regarded as one of those contradictory characters which, at all periods and in all portions of the world, have marked the human race. His dealings in the Stock Exchange were continued to a late period of his existence. In 1720, he speculated largely in the South-Sea Stock; and in 1724 he died, at the age of eighty-one, leaving by will £240,000 to the hospital which bears his name. His body lay in state at Mercer’s Chapel, was carried with great funeral pomp to St. Thomas’s Hospital, and on February 13th, 1734, just ten years after his death, a statue was erected to his memory in the square of that asylum, partially raised by profits from the hard earnings of English seamen.