in great numbers, as in the dockyard at Chatham, they were able to make their complaints heard and to obtain some redress.638 But the ignorant and helpless peasant was cruelly ground between one class which would give money only by tale and another which would take it only by weight.  Yet his sufferings hardly exceeded those of the unfortunate race of authors.  Of the way in which obscure writers were treated we may easily form a judgment from the letters, still extant, of Dryden to his bookseller Tonson.  One day Tonson sends forty brass shillings, to say nothing of clipped money.  Another day he pays a debt with pieces so bad that none of them will go.  The great poet sends them all back, and demands in their place guineas at twenty-nine shillings each.  “I expect,” he says in one letter, “good silver, not such as I have had formerly.”  “If you have any silver that will go,” he says in another letter, “my wife will be glad of it.  I lost thirty shillings or more by the last payment of fifty pounds.”  These complaints and demands, which have been preserved from destruction only by the eminence of the writer, are doubtless merely a fair sample of the correspondence which filled all the mail bags of England during several months.

In the midst of the public distress one class prospered greatly, the bankers; and among the bankers none could in skill or in luck bear a comparison with Charles Duncombe.  He had been, not many years before, a goldsmith of very moderate wealth.  He had probably, after the fashion of his craft, plied for customers under the arcades of the Royal Exchange, had saluted merchants with profound bows, and had begged to be allowed the honour of keeping their cash.  But so dexterously did he now avail himself of the opportunities of profit which the general confusion of prices gave to a moneychanger, that, at the moment when the trade of the kingdom was depressed to the lowest point, he laid down near ninety thousand pounds for the estate of Helmsley in the North Riding of Yorkshire.  That great property had, in a troubled time, been bestowed by the Commons of England on their victorious general Fairfax, and had been part of the dower which Fairfax’s daughter had brought to the brilliant and dissolute Buckingham.  Thither Buckingham, having wasted in mad intemperance, sensual and intellectual, all the choicest bounties of nature and of fortune, had carried the feeble ruins of his fine person and of his fine mind; and there he had closed his chequered life under that humble roof and on that coarse pallet which the great satirist of the succeeding generation described in immortal verse.  The spacious domain passed to a new race; and in a few years a palace more splendid and costly than had ever been inhabited by the magnificent Villiers rose amidst the beautiful woods and waters which had been his, and was called by the once humble name of Duncombe.