anation of the
puzzle on board the departing vessel (on the road to Windsor, at the
Premier's reception, in the cell of the Police, in the presence of the
Magistrate-whose crack of a totally inverse decision upon their
case, when he becomes acquainted with the titles and station of
these imputedly peccant, refreshes them), they hold debates over the
mysterious contrarieties of a people professing in one street what they
confound in the next, and practising by day a demureness that yells with
the cat of the tiles at night.

Granting all that, it being a transient novelist's business to please
the light-winged hosts which live for the hour, and give him his only
chance of half of it, let him identify himself with them, in keeping to
the quadrille on the surface and shirking the disagreeable.

Clouds of high colour above London City are as the light of the Goddess
to lift the angry heroic head over human. They gloriously transfigure.
A Murillo beggar is not more precious than sight of London in any of the
streets admitting coloured cloud-scenes; the cunning of the sun's hand
so speaks to us. And if haply down an alley some olive mechanic of
street-organs has quickened little children's legs to rhythmic footing,
they strike on thoughts braver than pastoral. Victor Radnor, lover of
the country though he was, would have been the first to say it. He
would indeed have said it too emphatically. Open London as a theme, to a
citizen of London ardent for the clear air out of it, you have roused
an orator; you have certainly fired a magazine, and must listen to his
reminiscences of one of its paragraphs or pages.

The figures of the hurtled fair ones in sky were wreathing Nelson's
cocked hat when Victor, distinguishably bright-faced amid a crowd of
the irradiated, emerged from the tideway to cross the square, having
thoughts upon Art, which were due rather to the suggestive proximity of
the National Gallery than to the Flemish mouldings of cloud-forms under
Venetian brushes. His purchases of pictures had been his unhappiest
ventures. He had relied and reposed on the dicta of newspaper critics;
who are sometimes unanimous, and are then taken for guides, and are
fatal. He was led to the conclusion that our modern-lauded pictures do
not ripen. They have a chance of it, if abused. But who thinks of
buying the abused? Exalted by the critics, they have, during the days
of Exhibition, a glow, a significance or a fun, abandoning them wher