old fellow gets his trouncing from the critics monthly. See
Colney to-morrow, my love. Now go to sleep. We have got over the worst. I
speak at my Meeting to-morrow and am a champagne-bottle of notes and
points for them.'

His lost Idea drew close to him in sleep: or he thought so, when awaking
to the conception of a people solidified, rich and poor, by the common
pride of simple manhood. But it was not coloured, not a luminous globe:
and the people were in drab, not a shining army on the march to meet the
Future. It looked like a paragraph in a newspaper, upon which a Leading
Article sits, dutifully arousing the fat worm of sarcastic humour under
the ribs of cradled citizens, with an exposure of its excellent folly. He
would not have it laughed at; still he could not admit it as more than a
skirt of the robe of his Idea. For let none think him a mere City
merchant, millionnaire, boon-fellow, or music-loving man of the world. He
had ideas to shoot across future Ages;--provide against the shrinkage of
our Coal-beds; against, and for, if you like, the thickening, jumbling,
threatening excess of population in these Islands, in Europe, America,
all over our habitable sphere. Now that Mrs. Burman, on her way to bliss,
was no longer the dungeon-cell for the man he would show himself to be,
this name for successes, corporate nucleus of the enjoyments, this Victor
Montgomery Radnor, intended impressing himself upon the world as a
factory of ideas. Colney's insolent charge, that the English have no
imagination--a doomed race, if it be true!--would be confuted. For our
English require but the lighted leadership to come into cohesion, and
step ranked, and chant harmoniously the song of their benevolent aim. And
that astral head giving, as a commencement, example of the right use of
riches, the nation is one, part of the riddle of the future solved.

Surely he had here the Idea? He had it so warmly, that his bath-water
heated. Only the vision was wanted.

On London Bridge he had seen it--a great thing done to the flash of
brilliant results. That was after a fall.

There had been a fall also of the scheme of Lakelands.

Come to us with no superstitious whispers of indications and
significations in the fall!--But there had certainly been a moral fall,
fully to the level of the physical, in the maintaining of that scheme of
Lakelands, now ruined by his incomprehensible Nesta--who had saved him
from falling further. His bath-water c