e closing of a controversy:--it banged the door and rolled
drum-notes; it deafened reason. And was it a London cockney crow-word of
the day, or a word that had stuck in the fellow's head from the perusal
of his pothouse newspaper columns?

Furthermore, the plea of a fall, and the plea of a shock from a fall,
required to account for the triviality of the mind, were humiliating to
him who had never hitherto missed a step, or owned to the shortest of
collapses. This confession of deficiency in explosive repartee--using a
friend's term for the ready gift--was an old and a rueful one with Victor
Radnor. His godmother Fortune denied him that. She bestowed it on his
friend Fenellan, and little else. Simeon Fenellan could clap the halter
on a coltish mob; he had positively caught the roar of cries and stilled
it, by capping the cries in turn, until the people cheered him; and the
effect of the scene upon Victor Radnor disposed him to rank the gift of
repartee higher than a certain rosily oratorical that he was permitted to
tell himself he possessed, in bottle if not on draught. Let it only be
explosive repartee: the well-fused bomb, the bubble to the stone, echo
round the horn. Fenellan, would have discharged an extinguisher on
punctilio in emission. Victor Radnor was unable to cope with it
reflectively.

No, but one doesn't like being beaten by anything! he replied to an
admonishment of his better mind, as he touched his two fingers, more
significantly dubious than the whole hand, at the back of his head, and
checked or stemmed the current of a fear. For he was utterly unlike
himself; he was dwelling on a trifle, on a matter discernibly the
smallest, an incident of the streets; and although he refused to feel a
bump or any responsive notification of a bruise, he made a sacrifice of
his native pride to his intellectual, in granting that he must have been
shaken, so childishly did he continue thinking.

Yes, well, and if a tumble distorts our ideas of life, and an odd word
engrosses our speculations, we are poor creatures, he addressed another
friend, from whom he stood constitutionally in dissent naming him Colney;
and under pressure of the name, reviving old wrangles between them upon
man's present achievements and his probable destinies: especially upon
England's grandeur, vitality, stability, her intelligent appreciation of
her place in the universe; not to speak of the historic dignity of London
City. Colney had to be ove