francs, and his frail barque, which carried Cæsar and his fortunes, landed Nathan in the evening at Dover. When he appeared on June 20, leaning against his usual pillar in the Stock Exchange, everything and everybody looked gloomy. He whispered to a few of his most intimate friends that the allied army had been defeated. The dismal news spread like wildfire, and there was a tremendous fall in the funds. Nathan’s known agents sold with the rest, but his unknown agents bought every scrap of paper that was to be had. It was not till the afternoon of June 21 that the news of the victory of Waterloo became known. Nathan was the first to inform his friends of the happy event, a quarter of an hour before the news was given to the public. The funds rose faster than they had fallen, and Nathan still leant against his pillar in the southern corner of the Stock Exchange, but richer by about a million sterling. From that day the career of Nathan was one of ever-increasing prosperity; his firm became the agents of all European Governments; he made bargains with the Czar of Russia and with South American Republics, with the Pope and the Sultan. About the morality of the Waterloo episode the less said the better, but peers and princes of the blood, bishops and archbishops, partook of his sumptuous banquets, whilst he calculated to a penny on what a clerk could live! [#] To an article I wrote twenty-five years ago on this topic I find appended the following note: ’We give the following on the authority of Martin, but must add that a private friend, who formerly filled an office of trust in the firm of Rothschild Brothers, declares the whole to be a fiction.’ But who this friend was we cannot now remember. Another financier, who almost rivalled Rothschild as a speculator, was Abraham Goldsmid, who was ruined by a conspiracy. He, in conjunction with a banking establishment, had taken a large Government loan. The conspirators managed to cause the omnium stock to fall to 18 discount. The result was Goldsmid’s failure and eventually his suicide, whilst the conspirators made a profit of about £2,000,000. Among other notable stockbrokers we must not omit Francis Bailey, F.S.A., President of the Royal Astronomical Society, who retired from the Stock Exchange in 1825. In 1851 he repeated at his house in Tavistock Place, Russell Square, the Cavendish experiment of weighing the earth, and calculating its bulk and figure, and at the same time verifying the standard measure of the British nation, and rectifying pendulum experiments. In the garden of the house a small observatory was erected for those purposes, and is, we believe, still standing.