His Minister (satirically, or in sympathetic Conservatism) would have them not to move on, that they may preserve among beholders the impression of their handsome frontage.  Night, however, will come; and they, adoreing the decent face, are moved on, made to expose what the Rajah sees.  Behind his courteousness, he is an antagonistic observer of his conquerors; he pushes his questions farther than the need for them; his Minister the same; apparently to retain the discountenanced people in their state of exposure.  Up to the time of the explanation of the puzzle on board the departing vessel (on the road to Windsor, at the Premier’s reception, in the cell of the Police, in the presence of the Magistrate-whose crack of a totally inverse decision upon their case, when he becomes acquainted with the titles and station of these imputedly peccant, refreshes them), they hold debates over the mysterious contrarieties of a people professing in one street what they confound in the next, and practising by day a demureness that yells with the cat of the tiles at night.

Granting all that, it being a transient novelist’s business to please the light-winged hosts which live for the hour, and give him his only chance of half of it, let him identify himself with them, in keeping to the quadrille on the surface and shirking the disagreeable.

Clouds of high colour above London City are as the light of the Goddess to lift the angry heroic head over human.  They gloriously transfigure.  A Murillo beggar is not more precious than sight of London in any of the streets admitting coloured cloud-scenes; the cunning of the sun’s hand so speaks to us.  And if haply down an alley some olive mechanic of street-organs has quickened little children’s legs to rhythmic footing, they strike on thoughts braver than pastoral.  Victor Radnor, lover of the country though he was, would have been the first to say it.  He would indeed have said it too emphatically.  Open London as a theme, to a citizen of London ardent for the clear air out of it, you have roused an orator; you have certainly fired a magazine, and must listen to his reminiscences of one of its paragraphs or pages.

The figures of the hurtled fair ones in sky were wreathing Nelson’s cocked hat when Victor, distinguishably bright-faced amid a crowd of the irradiated, emerged from the tideway to cross the square, having thoughts upon Art, which were due rather to the suggestive proximity of the National Gallery than to the Flemish mouldings of cloud-forms under Venetian brushes.  His purchases of pictures had been his unhappiest ventures.  He had relied and reposed on the dicta of newspaper critics; who are sometimes unanimous, and are then taken for guides, and are fatal.  He was led to the conclusion that our modern-lauded pictures do not ripen.  They have a chance of it, if abused.  But who thinks of buying the abused?  Exalted by the critics, they have, during the days of Exhibition,