‘Soundest head in the City of London,’ Mr. Blathenoy remarked.

Sir Rodwell Blachington gave his nod.

The crowd interjected, half-sighing.  We ought to be proud of such a man!  Perhaps we are a trifle exaggerating, says its heart.  But that we are wholly grateful to him, is a distinct conclusion.  And he may be one of the great men of his time:  he has a quite individual style of dress.

Lady Rodwell Blachington observed to Colney Durance: 

‘Mr. Radnor bids fair to become the idol of the English people.’

’If he can prove himself to be sufficiently the dupe of the English people,’ said Colney.

‘Idol—­dupe?’ interjected Sir Rodwell, and his eyebrows fixed at the perch of Colney’s famous ‘national interrogation’ over vacancy of understanding, as if from the pull of a string.  He had his audience with him; and the satirist had nothing but his inner gush of acids at sight of a planted barb.

Colney was asked to explain.  He never explained.  He performed a series of astonishing leaps, like the branchy baboon above the traveller’s head in the tropical forest, and led them into the trap they assisted him to prepare for them.  ‘No humour, do you say?  The English have no humour?’ a nephew of Lady Blachington’s inquired of him, with polite pugnacity, and was cordially assured, that ‘he vindicated them.’

‘And Altruistic! another specimen of the modern coinage,’ a classical Church dignitary, in grammarian disgust, remarked to a lady, as they passed.

Colney pricked-up his ears.  It struck him that he might fish for suggestions in aid of the Grand Argument before the Elders of the Court of Japan.  Dr. Wardan, whose recognition he could claim, stated to him, that the lady and he were enumerating words of a doubtfully legitimate quality now being inflicted upon the language.

‘The slang from below is perhaps preferable?’ said Colney.

‘As little-less.’

’But a pirate-tongue, cut-off from its roots, must continue to practise piracy, surely, or else take reinforcements in slang, otherwise it is inexpressive of new ideas.’

‘Possibly the new ideas are best expressed in slang.’

’If insular.  They will consequently be incommunicable to foreigners.  You would, then, have us be trading with tokens instead of a precious currency?  Yet I cannot perceive the advantage of letting our ideas be clothed so racy of the obscener soil; considering the pretensions of the English language to become the universal.  If we refuse additions from above, they force themselves on us from below.’

Dr. Wardan liked the frame of the observations, disliked the substance.

‘One is to understand that the English language has these pretensions?’ he said:—­he minced in his manner, after the well-known mortar-board and tassel type; the mouthing of a petrifaction:  clearly useless to the pleadings of the patriotic Dr. Bouthoin and his curate.