It is strange to realise that the man, who brought all that hubbub of fashion back to the neighbourhood of the Royal Exchange, was a tall and ungainly pockmarked Scotchman, Law by name--at one time lying in a London Prison under sentence of death for murder. Law escaped to Paris and there founded the Mississippi Company, which, during the first years of the century sent France wild with a frenzy of speculation. Some southerly wind blew the madness over to England, and in 1711 Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, founded the South Sea Company, to take over England’s Floating Debt of ten million pounds. The Government guaranteed six per cent. for a term of years, and the Company was given the monopoly of trade with the Southern Atlantic Coasts of America. One or two solid brains, such as Sir Robert Walpole, stood out against the scheme, but speculation was in the air and they had no following. [Illustration: SOUTH SEA BUBBLE BROADSHEET. 1720.] It must be conceded that the name of the company was in itself a stroke of genius. The South Seas! The words have from the earliest days of Elizabeth had some queer romantic appeal to the people of England. Read “Hakluyt’s Voyages,” and you cannot but rise from your reading with a recognition that, beyond all the visions of gold and jewels and wealth which they may suggest, the South Seas have their own particular call. Even that pedestrian century--the 18th--could not be deaf to it; and there never was an idea so sure to arouse your imagination or to loosen your purse-strings as that of adventure in the South Seas. Your adventure might be vicarious; it might only be visible to you in the swelling of your banking account, but you had a hand in the voyage--in a sense you sailed those sunlit and wind-ruffled waters. It seemed as if in response to the call, Change Alley had become the centre of England. Sedan chairs and coaches so jostled one another in the streets which surrounded it that a man on foot was known to have taken one good hour before he could cross the roadway. Women filled that narrow alley with their hoops, and so loud was the noise between the walls that the stock would be at one price at one end and at another price at the other and no one in the middle would know the difference. “Then stars and garters did appear Among the meaner rabble; To buy and sell, to see and hear The Jews and Gentiles squabble. The greater ladies thither came, And plied in chariots daily, Or pawned their jewels for a sum To venture in the Alley.”