There is, too, especially about the latter, perhaps, a touch of comic suggestiveness in the sublime preoccupation to which we owe their great legacies, that look of Atlas which is always pathetic, when it is not foolish, on the face of a mortal:  the grand air of a Goethe, the colossal absorption of a Balzac.  Their attitude offends one’s sense of the relation of things, and we feel that, after all, we could have spared half their works for a larger share of that delicate instinct for proportion, which is one of the most precious attributes of what we call a gentleman.  But the demi-god has always much of the nouveau riche about him, and a gentleman is, after all, an exquisite product.  Indeed, the world has, one may think, quite enough genius to go on with.  It could well do with a few more gentlemen.

A BORROWED SOVEREIGN

(TO MR. AND MRS. WELCH)

Jim lent me a sovereign.  He was working hard to make his home, and was saving every penny.  However, I took it, for I was really in sore straits.  If you have ever known what it is absolutely to need a sovereign, when you have neither banking account nor employment, and your evening clothes are no longer accessible for the last, you will be in a position to understand the transfiguring properties of one small piece of gold.  You leave your friend’s rooms a different man.  Like the virtuous in the Buddhistic round, you go in a beggar and come out a prince.  To vary Carlyle’s phrase, you can pay for dinners, you can call hansoms, you can take stalls; in fact, you are a prince—­to the extent of a sovereign.

And oh! how wooingly does the world seem to nestle round you—­the same world that was so cold and haughty ten minutes ago.  The world is a courtesan, and has heard you have found a sovereign.

The gaslights seem beaming love at you.  So near and bright are the streets, you want to stay out in them all night; though you didn’t relish the prospect last evening.  O sweet, sweet, siren London, with your golden voice—­I have a sovereign!

This, of course, was but the first rich impulse.  The sovereign should really be kept for the lodgings.  But the snug little oyster-shops about Booksellers’ Row are so tempting, and there is nothing like oysters to give one courage to open that giant oyster spoken of by Ancient Pistol.

I went in.  I assured my conscience that it should only be ‘Anglo-Portuguese,’ and that I would forego the roll and butter.  But ‘Anglos’ are not nice, Dutch are in every way to be preferred; and if you are paying eighteenpence you might as well pay three shillings, and what’s the use of drawing the line at a roll and butter?  No! we will repent after the roll and butter.  ‘Roll and butter’ shall be my Ebenezer.  The ‘r’s’ have a notorious mnemonic quality.  They will help me to remember.

So I sat down, and, fondling my sovereign in my pocket, fell into a dream.  When the oysters came I wished they had been ‘Anglos’ after all, because my dream had grown beautiful and troublesome, and I had really forgotten the oysters altogether.  However, I ate them mechanically, and ordering another half-dozen, so that the manager should not begrudge me my seat, I turned again to my dream.