APPENDIX TEXT NOTE PAGE PAGE On Some of the Old Actors (_London Magazine_, Feb., 1822) 315 444 The Old Actors (_London Magazine_, April, 1822) 322 444 The Old Actors (_London Magazine_, October, 1822) 331 444 NOTES 337 INDEX 447 FRONTISPIECE ELIA From a Drawing by Daniel Maclise, now preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum. ELIA (_From the 1st Edition, 1823_) THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE Reader, in thy passage from the Bank--where thou hast been receiving thy half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean annuitant like myself)--to the Flower Pot, to secure a place for Dalston, or Shacklewell, or some other thy suburban retreat northerly,--didst thou never observe a melancholy looking, handsome, brick and stone edifice, to the left--where Threadneedle-street abuts upon Bishopsgate? I dare say thou hast often admired its magnificent portals ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters and pillars, with few or no traces of goers-in or comers-out--a desolation something like Balclutha's.[1] This was once a house of trade,--a centre of busy interests. The throng of merchants was here--the quick pulse of gain--and here some forms of business are still kept up, though the soul be long since fled. Here are still to be seen stately porticos; imposing staircases; offices roomy as the state apartments in palaces--deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling clerks; the still more sacred interiors of court and committee rooms, with venerable faces of beadles, door-keepers--directors seated in form on solemn days (to proclaim a dead dividend,) at long worm-eaten tables, that have been mahogany, with tarnished gilt-leather coverings, supporting massy silver inkstands long since dry;--the oaken wainscots hung with pictures of deceased governors and sub-governors, of queen Anne, and the two first monarchs of the Brunswick dynasty;--huge charts, which subsequent discoveries have antiquated;--dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams,--and soundings of the Bay of Panama!--The long passages hung with buckets, appended, in idle row, to walls, whose substance might defy any, short of the last, conflagration;--with vast ranges of cellarage under all, where dollars and pieces of eight once lay, an "unsunned heap," for Mammon to have solaced his solitary heart withal,--long since dissipated, or scattered into air at the blast of the breaking of that famous BUBBLE.--