Some London streets have strange and unsuitable names; thus you will find an alley of wretched hovels, with muddy yards, containing nothing but cabbage-stumps and broken dustbins, called Prospect Place; whilst a lane adjoining the shambles styles itself Paradise Row. And what a curious name for a street is that of Threadneedle[#] Street! How came the street to be so named? However, such is its name, and in this case it is not inappropriate. For lives there not in that street the Old Lady who is, year in, year out, everlastingly threading her diamond needle with gold and silver threads, and working the gorgeous embroidery of the financial flags of her own and of almost every other country in the world? Her dwelling is palatial; to be merely admitted into her parlour is in itself a positive proof of your respectability, for you gain no entrance thereto unless you are a stockholder; as to her drawing-room, the glories of Versailles and the Escurial are as miserable shanties, for _her_ drawing-room contains, leaving alone other treasures, engravings worth from five pounds each to fifty thousand—nay, a hundred thousand pounds each. There is no five o’clock tea there, but plenty of music all day long; its notes, indeed, are silent, but the gold and silver instruments, whose fascinating and entrancing sounds have more magic in them than has the finest orchestra, vocal or instrumental, are audible enough. And as to her cellars, the treasures the Old Lady keeps there would buy up half a dozen such caves as that into which Aladdin descended. [#] Stow calls it Three Needle Street, as Hatton supposes, from such a sign. It has also been written Thrid Needle and Thred Needle Street, but our ancestors were not so particular as to spelling as we are. The reader has by this time discovered who the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street is—namely, the Bank of England—the most gigantic monetary establishment in the world, the financial reservoir, the opening or shutting of whose sluices causes not only the commercial ebb and flow of east and west, of north and south, but sets in motion or prevents the ’pomp and circumstance of glorious war.’ The history of this mighty establishment has often been told, but it seems to us that but scant justice has as yet been done to its founder, William Paterson. The injustice done to him, in fact, dates from an early day, for soon after the foundation of the Bank, of which he naturally was one of the directors, intrigue drove him from that position, and envy and obloquy pursued him ever after. But let us briefly recount his early history.