Perhaps the most characteristic passage in the volume is that where, in the manner of a philosopher who suddenly finds himself awake in this “half-realized” world, he scans the institution of an army—­looks out upon the soldier.

“Who can despair of Government that passes a soldier’s guard-house, or meets a red-coated man on the streets!  That a body of men could be got together to kill other men when you bade them; this, a priori, does it not seem one of the impossiblest things?  Yet look—­behold it; in the stolidest of do-nothing Governments, that impossibility is a thing done.  See it there, with buff-belts, red coats on its back; walking sentry at guard-houses, brushing white breeches in barracks; an indisputable, palpable fact.  Out of grey antiquity, amid all finance-difficulties, scaccarium-tallies, ship-monies, coat-and-conduct monies, and vicissitudes of chance and time, there, down to the present blessed hour, it is.

“Often, in these painfully decadent, and painfully nascent times, with their distresses, inarticulate gaspings, and ‘impossibilities;’ meeting a tall lifeguardsman in his snow-white trousers, or seeing those two statuesque lifeguardsmen, in their frowning bearskins, pipe-clayed buckskins, on their coal-black, sleek, fiery quadrupeds, riding sentry at the Horse-Guards—­it strikes one with a kind of mournful interest, how, in such universal down-rushing and wrecked impotence of almost all old institutions, this oldest fighting institution is still so young!  Fresh complexioned, firm-limbed, six feet by the standard, this fighting man has verily been got up, and can fight.  While so much has not yet got into being, while so much has gone gradually out of it, and become an empty semblance, a clothes’-suit, and highest king’s-cloaks, mere chimeras parading under them so long, are getting unsightly to the earnest eye, unsightly, almost offensive, like a costlier kind of scarecrow’s blanket—­here still is a reality!

“The man in horse-hair wig advances, promising that he will get me ‘justice;’ he takes me into Chancery law-courts, into decades, half-centuries of hubbub, of distracted jargon; and does get me—­disappointment, almost desperation; and one refuge—­that of dismissing him and his ‘justice’ altogether out of my head.  For I have work to do; I cannot spend my decades in mere arguing with other men about the exact wages of my work:  I will work cheerfully with no wages, sooner than with a ten years’ gangrene or Chancery lawsuit in my heart.  He of the horse-hair wig is a sort of failure; no substance, but a fond imagination of the mind.  He of the shovel-hat, again, who comes forward professing that he will save my soul.  O ye eternities, of him in this place be absolute silence!  But he of the red coat, I say, is a success and no failure!  He will veritably, if he gets orders, draw out a long sword and kill me.  No mistake there.