Lord Stanhope ruptured a blood-vessel in replying to a furious speech of the Duke of Wharton (who lived a profligate and died a monk) against S. S., and did not long survive. Samuel Chandler, the eminent Nonconformist divine, was ruined, and had to keep a book-stall for bread. Hudson, known as “Tom of Ten Thousand,” went stark mad, and moved about ’Change just as the “Woman in Black” and the “Woman in White” (the son of the one, and the brother of the other were hanged for forgery), used to haunt the avenues of the Bank of England. The South Sea Company bribed the Government, bribed the two Houses, and bribed the Court ladies, both of fair and of light fame. Erengard Melusina Schuylenberg, Princess von Eberstein, Duchess of Munster (1715), and Duchess of Kendal (1729)—Hogarth engraved the High Dutch hussey’s arms—the Countess of Platen, and her two nieces, and Lady Sunderland, with Craggs and Aislabie, got the major part of the fictitious stock of 574,000_l._ created by the company. The stock rose to thirteen hundred and fifty pounds premium! Beggars on horseback tore through the streets. There were S. S. coaches with _Auri sacra fames_ painted on the panels. Hundreds of companies were projected, and “took the town” immensely. Steele’s (Sir Richard’s) Fishpool Company, for bringing the finny denizens of the deep by sea to London—Puckle’s Defence Gun—the Bottomree, the Coral-fishery, the Wreck-fishing companies, were highly spoken of. Stogden’s remittances created great excitement in the market. There were companies for insurance against bad servants, against thefts and robberies, against fire and shipwreck. There were companies for importing jack-asses from Spain (coals to Newcastle!); for trading in human hair (started by a clergyman); for fattening pigs; for making pantiles, Joppa and Castile soap; for manufacturing lutestring; “for the wheel of a perpetual motion;” and for extracting stearine from sunflower-seed. There were Dutch bubbles, and oil bubbles, and water bubbles—bubbles of timber, and bubbles of glass. There were the “sail cloth,” or “Globe permits”—mere cards with the seal of the “Globe” tavern impressed on them, and “permitting” the fortunate holders to acquire shares at some indefinite period in some misty sailcloth factory. These sold for sixty guineas a piece. There was Jezreel Jones’s trade to Barbary, too, for which the permits could not be sold fast enough. Welsh copper and York Buildings’ shares rose to cent. per cent. premium. Sir John Blunt, the scrivener, rose from a mean estate to prodigious wealth, prospered, and “whale directors ate up all.” There was an S. S. literature—an S. S. anthology. “Meantime, secure on Garrway’s cliffs, A savage race, by shipwreck fed, Lie waiting for the founder’d skiffs, And strip the bodies of the dead.”