The original Lloyd was a wonderfully good example of a pushing London citizen. Little was, speaking in these later days, known of Edward of that ilk till Mr. Frederick Martin unearthed, in the vaults of the Royal Exchange, a long-forgotten series of its archives. Then he found “huge stores of manuscript papers and immense leather-cased folios, partly singed in the great fire which, in 1838, destroyed the Royal Exchange above them.” Now we know that Lloyd, early in the reign of Charles II., kept a coffee-house in Tower Street, and contrived to make it the gathering point for the underwriters, who had been previously scattered all over the city. This house was near the Custom House, the Navy Office, and the Trinity House, as well as to the Thames “below bridge,” and the position was obviously a good one for the purpose. Having surrounded himself with a growing connection in Tower Ward, Lloyd found himself in a position to approach the haunts of the leading merchants and bankers, and we find him in 1693 securely established at the corner of Lombard Street and Abchurch Lane, near the spot where the Lombard Street post-office now stands. Here he held periodical auction sales “by the candle,” and started a weekly paper devoted to maritime affairs, the first of its kind: indeed it was, saving the _London Gazette_, the only London newspaper yet in existence. But he now met a severe blow, for, as we learn from Macaulay, “the judges were unanimously of opinion that this liberty (of printing) did not extend to gazettes,” and that, by English law, no man not authorised by the Crown had the right to publish political news. The said political news in this case consisted of mere headings and brief paragraphs, as, “Yesterday the Lords passed the Bill to restrain the wearing of all wrought silks from India,” or that they had received a “petition from the Quakers.” Lloyd had to succumb and stop the publication, but his sales of ships and cargoes increased, so that in fifteen or twenty years Lloyd’s had become the recognised London centre of maritime business, including marine insurance. From this comparatively small beginning has sprung the all-powerful organisation whose agents are to be found in every part of the habitable globe.