To do good and sleep well, was their sowing and their reaping.  Uneasy consciences could not have slept.  The sleeping served for proof of an accurate reckoning and an expungeing of the day’s debits.  They differed in opinion now and then, as we see companion waves of the river, blown by a gust, roll a shadow between them; and almost equally transient were their differences with a world that they condemned when they could not feel they (as an embodiment of their principles) were leading it.  The English world at times betrayed a restiveness in the walled pathway of virtue; for, alas, it closely neighbours the French; only a Channel, often dangerously smooth, to divide:  but it is not perverted for long; and the English Funds are always constant and a tower.  Would they be suffered to be so, if libertinism were in the ascendant?

Colney Durance was acquainted with the Duvidney ladies.  Hearing of the journey to them and the purport of it, he said, with the mask upon glee:  ‘Then Victor has met his match!’ Nataly had sent for him to dine with her in Victor’s absence:  she was far from grieved, as to the result, by his assurance to her, that Victor had not a chance.  Colney thought so.  ’Just like him! to be off gaily to try and overcome or come over the greatest power in England.’  They were England herself; the squat old woman she has become by reason of her overlapping numbers of the comfortable fund-holder annuitants:  a vast body of passives and negatives, living by precept, according to rules of precedent, and supposing themselves to be righteously guided because of their continuing undisturbed.  Them he branded, as hypocritical materialists, and the country for pride in her sweetmeat plethora of them:—­mixed with an ancient Hebrew fear of offence to an inscrutable Lord, eccentrically appeasable through the dreary iteration of the litany of sinfulness.  He was near a truth; and he had the heat of it on him.

Satirists in their fervours might be near it to grasp it, if they could be moved to moral distinctness, mental intention, with a preference of strong plain speech over the crack of their whips.  Colney could not or would not praise our modern adventurous, experimental, heroic, tramping active, as opposed to yonder pursy passives and negatives; he had occasions for flicking the fellow sharply:  and to speak of the Lord as our friend present with us, palpable to Reason, perceptible to natural piety solely through the reason, which justifies punishment; that would have stopped his mouth upon the theme of God-forsaken creatures.  Our satirist is an executioner by profession, a moralist in excuse, or at the tail of it; though he thinks the position reversed, when he moralizes angrily to have his angry use of the scourge condoned.  Nevertheless, he fills a serviceable place; and certainly he is not happy in his business.  Colney suffered as heavily as he struck.  If he had been no more than a mime in the motley of satire, he would have sucked compensation from the acid of his phrases, for the failure to prick and goad, and work amendment.