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The establishment, accordingly, when it was taken over by the city in 1876, retained virtually the same aspect as it had worn in the seventeenth century, and remains to the present day perhaps the best example in the world of an old-fashioned city business house of the honest time when merchant-princes were content to live above their office, instead of seeking solace in smug suburban villas.

Copley" used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in; and a quaint-looking key in his hand. Our conversation was short, but long enough to convince me that the Little Gentleman did not want my company in his chamber, and did not mean to have it. I have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all, a schoolgirl's secrets and a whimsical man's habits.

Copley" used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in; and a quaint-looking key in his hand. Our conversation was short, but long enough to convince me that the Little Gentleman did not want my company in his chamber, and did not mean to have it. I have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all, a schoolgirl's secrets and a whimsical man's habits.

We are all, in measure, beggars; but Beppo, in the large style of kings and robber-barons, asks for his baiocco, and, like the merchant-princes, keeps his bank. The shadows close around him as he passes along; salutations greet him from the damp shops; and darkness at last swallows up for a time the great square torso of the "King of the Beggars."

The gathering was numerous. Merchant-princes came for Madame Desvarennes's sake; bankers for Cayrol's; and the aristocrats and foreign nobility for the Prince's. An assemblage as opposed in ideas as in manners: some valuing only money, others high birth; all proud and elbowing each other with haughty assurance, speaking ill of each other and secretly jealous.

From the outset the Phoenicians had been desirous to employ their capital as landlords as well as traders, and to practise agriculture on a large scale by means of slaves or hired labourers; a large portion of the Jews in this way served the merchant-princes of Tyre for daily wages.

Meanwhile, all the other evils of the time, the monopolies of the merchant-princes of the cities and of the trading-syndicates, the dearness of living, the scarcity of money, etc., did not abate, but rather increased from year to year. The Catholic Church maintained itself especially in the South of Germany, and the official Reformation took on a definitely aristocratic character.

But in this case the civilian element in the province was of more importance than the army. The merchant-princes of Utica, groaning over the vanished capital which they had invested in Numidian concerns, heard a criticism and a boast which appealed strongly to their impatient minds.

As the Senator said, a banquet hall did not then suggest a Fifth Avenue hairdresser's saloon. But now the Genoese merchant-princes would find that their state had lost its identity in machine made imitations, and that it would be more distinguished to be poor, since poverty is never counterfeited. But poppa declined to go as far as that.

Had he been bred to the law, he would have shone among its brightest stars; but those gifts, which so many envied, were buried in trade, and though he became one of the merchant-princes of the city, even this success could not compensate for so great a burial of gifts.