think of the lengthened tide-flux of pedestrian
citizens facing South-westward, as being drawn by devout attraction to
our nourishing luminary: at the hour, mark, when the Norland cloud-king,
after a day of wild invasion, sits him on his restful bank of bluefish
smack-o'-cheek red above Whitechapel, to spy where his last puff of icy
javelins pierces and dismembers the vapoury masses in cluster about
the circle of flame descending upon the greatest and most elevated of
Admirals at the head of the Strand, with illumination of smoke-plumed
chimneys, house-roofs, window-panes, weather-vanes, monument and
pedimental monsters, and omnibus umbrella. One would fair believe that
they advance admireing; they are assuredly made handsome by the beams.
No longer mere concurrent atoms of the furnace of business (from
coal-dust to sparks, rushing, as it were, on respiratory blasts of an
enormous engine's centripetal and centrifugal energy), their step is
leisurely to meet the rosy Dinner, which is ever a see-saw with the God
of Light in his fall; the mask of the noble human visage upon them
is not roughened, as at midday, by those knotted hard ridges of the
scrambler's hand seen from forehead down to jaw; when indeed they have
all the appearance of sour scientific productions. And unhappily for
the national portrait, in the Poem quoted, the Rajah's Minister chose
an hour between morning and meridian, or at least before an astonished
luncheon had come to composure inside their persons, for drawing his
Master's attention to the quaint similarity of feature in the units of
the busy antish congregates they had travelled so far to visit and to
study:

These Britons wear
The driven and perplexed look of men
Begotten hastily 'twixt business hours

It could not have been late afternoon.

These Orientals should have seen them, with Victor Radnor among them,
fronting the smoky splendours of the sunset. In April, the month of
piled and hurried cloud, it is a Rape of the Sabines overhead from
all quarters, either one of the winds brawnily larcenous; and London,
smoking royally to the open skies, builds images of a dusty epic fray
for possession of the portly dames. There is immensity, swinging motion,
collision, dusky richness of colouring, to the sight; and to the mind
idea. London presents it. If we can allow ourselves a moment for not
inquireing scrupulously (you will do it by inhaling the aroma of the
ripe k