The Bank of England, projected by the noted William Paterson, amidst and by favour of the difficulties of the public exchequer during King William’s expensive continental wars, may be said to have commenced its actual banking operations on the first day of this year. Considerable attention was drawn to the subject in London, and the establishment of a similar public bank in both Ireland and Scotland became matter of speculation. There was in London an almost retired merchant named John Holland, who thought hereafter of spending his time chiefly in rural retirement. To him came one day a friend, a native of Scotland, who was inspired with a strong desire to see a bank established in his country. He desired that Mr Holland would think of it. ‘Why,’ said the latter, ‘I have nearly withdrawn from all such projects, and think only of how I may spend the remainder of my days in peace.’ ‘Think of it,’ said his Scottish friend, ‘and if you will [Sidenote: 1695.] enter into the scheme, I can assure you of having an act of our parliament for it on your own conditions.’ Mr Holland accordingly drew out a sketch of a plan for a bank in Scotland, which his friend, in a very few days thereafter, had transfused into a parliamentary bill of the Scottish form. He had also spoken, he said, to most of his countrymen of any mercantile importance in London to engage their favour for the scheme. Mr Holland was readily induced to lend his aid in further operations, and the project appears to have quickly come to a bearing, for, little more than six months from the opening of the Bank of England, the act for the Bank of Scotland had passed the native parliament. In our country, as in England, exchanges and other monetary transactions, such as are now left to banking companies, had hitherto been solely in the hands of a few leading merchants; some such place as the back-shop of a draper in the High Street of Edinburgh, or an obscure counting-room in the Saltmarket of Glasgow, was all that we could shew as a bank before this period; and the business transacted, being proportioned to the narrow resources and puny industry of the country, was upon a scale miserably small. Yet there was now, as we have seen, an expansive tendency in Scotland, and the time seems to have arrived when at least a central establishment for the entire country might properly be tried in the capital.