rather than daily
labour and perpetual contumely? After all, the fault is in fortune and
the world, not me! Oh, Lucy! had I but been born in your sphere, had
I but possessed the claim to merit you, what would I not have done and
dared and conquered for your sake!"

Such, or similar to these, were the thoughts of Clifford during the
interval between his resolution of seeing Lucy and the time of effecting
it. The thoughts were of no pleasing though of an exciting nature;
nor were they greatly soothed by the ingenious occupation of cheating
himself into the belief that if he was a highwayman, it was altogether
the fault of the highways.

CHAPTER XXI.

Dream. Let me but see her, dear Leontins.
Humorous Lieutenant.

Hempskirke. It was the fellow, sure.
Wolfort. What are you, sirrah?
Beggar's Bush.

O thou divine spirit that burnest in every breast, inciting each with
the sublime desire to be fine; that stirrest up the great to become
little in order to seem greater, and that makest a duchess woo insult
for a voucher,--thou that delightest in so many shapes, multifarious yet
the same; spirit that makest the high despicable, and the lord meaner
than his valet; equally great whether thou cheatest a friend or cuttest
a father; lacquering all thou touchest with a bright vulgarity that thy
votaries imagine to be gold,--thou that sendest the few to fashionable
balls and the many to fashionable novels; that smitest even Genius as
well as Folly, making the favourites of the gods boast an acquaintance
they have not with the graces of a mushroom peerage rather than the
knowledge they have of the Muses of an eternal Helicon,--thou that
leavest in the great ocean of our manners no dry spot for the foot of
independence; that pallest on the jaded eye with a moving and girdling
panorama of daubed vilenesses, and fritterest away the souls of
free-born Britons into a powder smaller than the angels which dance
in myriads on a pin's point,--whether, O spirit! thou callest thyself
Fashion or Ton, or Ambition or Vanity or Cringing or Cant or any title
equally lofty and sublime,--would that from thy wings we could gain
but a single plume! Fain would we, in fitting strain, describe the
festivities of that memorable day when the benevolent Lord Mauleverer
received and blessed the admiring universe of Bath.

But to be less poetical, as