No, no; that city is not lost,
Which one heroic soul can boast.
So glorious none thy annals show
As he whom God's own voice bade go,
And raise an empire where the best
And bravest from their toils may rest.
Enna for them shall bloom again,
And Peace hail Garibaldi's reign.

VERY SINGULAR THINGS IN
               THE CITY.

IT is a singular thing that all the working
engineers, and stout-armed "navigators" who
planned, and dug out, and built up the Great
Northern Railway, were compelled, before they
commenced their labours, to wait for the oath of
one man, who happened to be William James
Robson, the future forger. The "compulsory
powers" of a railway act cannot be put in force,
and the "first sod" of a railway cannot be
turned, until oath has been made before a
magistrate that a certain amount of "capital" has
been subscribed. The man who cast up the sums
contained in the "deed of subscription," and
who certified that the requisite amount was
secured, was William James Robson, a lawyer's
clerk, who was afterwards in the Crystal Palace
share office in the City of London.

It is a very singular thing that a railway set in
motion, so to speak, by such a man, and falling,
as early as 1848, into the hands of an ambitious
costermonger, named Leopold Redpath, was not
robbed to a much greater extent than nearly a
quarter of a million sterling. It is a singular
thing that a Board of Directors should have
engaged this man without knowing that he once
hawked fish and poultry about the streets of
Folkestone, Kent; that he was successively a
lawyer's clerk, a shipping clerk, and a bankrupt
"insurance-broker," paying half-a-crown in the
pound. It is a singular thing that these directors
should have placed this man in an office where
the secretary's signature was kept in the form
of a stamp, which stamp was in a wooden book-
case, accessible to any clerk, at any hour of the
day, for the purpose of signing "stock certificates."
It is a singular thing, in an undertaking
representing some five millions of capital, that
"stock certificates" duly signed, but brought
in, under the operation of sales on the Stock
Exchange, to be cancelled, were put away
uncancelled in an ordinary cupboard, open to every
one employed in the "registrar's office." It is
a singular thing that when large irregularities
on the part of Mr. Registrar Redpath were
discovered two years and a half before his directors
had the courage to arrest him for fraud, he was
allowed to pay back certain sums of money, by
which he stopped inquiry. It is a singular thing
that if his career had been cut short at this point,
at Midsummer, 1854, and had not been suffered
to extend to Christmas, 1856, the shareholders
would have saved about seventy thousand
pounds in shares and dividends. Instead of
this, he was allowed to take a lofty tone about
his means and position "as a gentleman," and
some of his directors and fellow-labourers were
afraid of losing so valuable and important a
servant! It is a still more singular thing that if
an inquiry had been at once instituted in 1852,
when the first warning of "payments in excess
of dividends" should have been noticed and
acted upon, the delinquent would have stolen
only about seventy thousand pounds, instead of
two hundred and forty thousand.

It is a singular thing that the chief auditor
chosen for the accounts of this vast and
complicated enterprise, should have been a highly
respectable merchant, no doubt, but one who
haa been so unsuccessful in "auditing" his own
business transactions, that in the course of eleven
years he had been robbed by a clerk of thirty
thousand pounds. It is a singular feature in
the life of this auditor, that he never saw Redpath
in his life. Redpath was about the office, to
some purpose, for nearly ten years; but the
leading auditor never saw him, to his
knowledge, on any occasion.

It is a singular thing that this same auditor
was a Director of the Union Bank of London;
and that Mr. Leopold Redpath kept his banking
account at this bank. It is not to be presumed,
that an auditor of a railway, who never saw its
chief registrar, and that registrar so remarkable
a man, should, in his capacity of a bank director,
know much about the nature, amount, and
character of the different bank accounts. An
auditor who led the way in signing that
extraordinary document (detailed at page 203, in
No. 59 of this journal), wherein it was stated
that the "accounts and books in every
department" of the Great Northern Railway, were
"correct and most satisfactorily kept," about five
months before the great forger was brought to
justice, could hardly be expected to pry much
into bank ledgers, or to gather much information
if he did pry. Perhaps he relied too much
upon the "Governor" of the Union Bank, Sir
Peter Laurie, and upon this worthy magistrate's
world-famous reputation for "putting" everything
like an irregularity "down." An account,
such as Redpath must have kept at the Union
Bank, must have been highly "irregular," and
must have shown suspicious "irregularities,''
for a railway servant, to say nothing of an ex-
fish and poultry hawker, and a bankrupt
insurance-broker.

It is a singular thing that in this large and
flourishing joint-stock bank, with its many
branches, was William George Pullinger, the
chief of modern forgers. He has been hurried
off the scene in a very summary way, and is
beyond the reach of cross-examination; but it
requires little knowledge of his transactions to
opine that he was not ignorant of Leopold
Redpath's operations. He could not copy the
ex-fish and poultry hawker, by manufacturing
shares, but he could extract even more gold
from his employers' pockets with a simple
"pass-book." A "pass-book" costs only a few
shillings at any City stationer's, or less than
the price of a coarse and vulgar crowbar. The
little profit that the Union Bank of London