To swear and break:  they all grow rich by breaking!

the draper eagerly compounded.  He afterwards “grew rich.”  Audley, silently watching his victim, within two years, claims his doubled pennies, every month during twenty months.  The pennies had now grown up to pounds.  The knave perceived the trick, and preferred paying the forfeiture of his bond for L500, rather than to receive the visitation of all the little generation of compound interest in the last descendant of L2000, which would have closed with the draper’s shop.  The inventive genius of Audley might have illustrated that popular tract of his own times, Peacham’s “Worth of a Penny;” a gentleman who, having scarcely one left, consoled himself by detailing the numerous comforts of life it might procure in the days of Charles II.

Such petty enterprises at length assumed a deeper cast of interest.  He formed temporally partnerships with the stewards of country gentlemen.  They underlet estates which they had to manage; and anticipating the owner’s necessities, the estates in due time became cheap purchases for Audley and the stewards.  He usually contrived to make the wood pay for the land, which he called “making the feathers pay for the goose.”  He had, however, such a tenderness of conscience for his victim, that, having plucked the live feathers before he sent the unfledged goose on the common, he would bestow a gratuitous lecture in his own science—­teaching the art of making them grow again, by showing how to raise the remaining rents.  Audley thus made the tenant furnish at once the means to satisfy his own rapacity, and his employer’s necessities.  His avarice was not working by a blind, but on an enlightened principle; for he was only enabling the landlord to obtain what the tenant, with due industry, could afford to give.  Adam Smith might have delivered himself in the language of old Audley, so just was his standard of the value of rents.  “Under an easy landlord,” said Audley, “a tenant seldom thrives; contenting himself to make the just measure of his rents, and not labouring for any surplusage of estate.  Under a hard one, the tenant revenges himself upon the land, and runs away with the rent.  I would raise my rents to the present price of all commodities:  for if we should let our lands, as other men have done before us, now other wares daily go on in price, we should fall backward in our estates.”  These axioms of political economy were discoveries in his day.

Audley knew mankind practically, and struck into their humours with the versatility of genius:  oracularly deep with the grave, he only stung the lighter mind.  When a lord borrowing money complained to Audley of his exactions, his lordship exclaimed, “What, do you not intend to use a conscience?” “Yes, I intend hereafter to use it.  We moneyed people must balance accounts:  if you do not pay me, you cheat me; but, if you do, then I cheat your lordship.”  Audley’s moneyed conscience balanced the risk