heir wrath.

It is a strange feature of our age that the highest walk of the
real-life drama should be given up to the men of money, and that Finance
should be the most suggestive of all that is creative, fanciful, and
imaginative. What a commentary on our era! It is no paradox I pronounce
here. The greatest actor I ever saw, the most consummate artist, was a
railroad contractor; that is, he had more persuasiveness, more of that
magnetic captivation which subordinates reason to mere hope, than
any one I ever listened to. He scorned the pictorial, he despised all
landscape effects, he summoned to his aid no assistance from gorge or
mountain, no deep-bosomed wood or bright eddying river; he was a man of
culverts and cuttings, of quartz and limestone and flint; with a glance
he could estimate traffic, and with the speed of the lightning-flash
tell you what dividend could come of the shares.

It was, however, in results that he was grandiose. Hear him on the theme
of a completed line, a newly-opened tunnel, or a finished viaduct--it
was a Poem! Such a picture of gushing beatitude as he could paint! It
was the golden age--prosperity, happiness, and peace on every side;
the song of the husbandman at his plough mingling with the hum of the
village school; the thousand forms of civilisation, from cheap sugar to
penny serials, that would permeate the land; the peasant studying
social science over his tea, and the railway-guard supping his "cheap
Gladstone" as he speculated on the Antiquity of Man. Never was such an
Eden on earth, and all to be accomplished at the cost of a mere million
or two, with a "limited liability."

With what a grand contempt this great man talked of the people who
busied themselves in the visionary pursuits of politics or literature,
or who devoted themselves to the Arts or Field-sports! With him
earthworks were the grandest achievements of humanity, and there was
no such civiliser as a parliamentary train. Had he been simply an
enthusiast, that fatal false logic that _will_ track enthusiasm--however
it be guided--would have betrayed him: but the man was not an
enthusiast--he was a great actor; and while to capitalists and
speculators he appealed by all the seductive inducements of profits,
premiums, and preference shares, to the outer and unmoneyed world he
made his approaches by a beautiful and touching philanthropy.

Did he believe in all this? Heaven knows. He talked and acted as if he
did; and th