He is the husband of the Whitechapel Countess—­got himself into that mess; but whatever he does, he puts the stamp of style on it.  He and the thing he sets his hand to, they’re neat, they’re finished, they’re fitted to trot together, and they’ve a shining polish, natural, like a lily of the fields; or say Nature and Art, like the coat of a thoroughbred led into the paddock by his groom, if you’re of that mind.

Present at the start in Piccadilly, Gower took note of Lord Fleetwood’s military promptitude to do the work he had no taste for, and envied the self-compression which could assume so pleasant an air.  He heard here and there crisp comments on his lordship’s coach and horses and personal smartness; the word ‘style,’ which reflects handsomely on the connoisseur conferring it, and the question whether one of the ladies up there was the countess.  His task of unearthing and disentangling the monetary affairs of ‘one of the ladies’ compelled the wish to belong to the party soon to be towering out of the grasp of bricks, and delightfully gay, spirited, quick for fun.  A fellow, he thought, may brood upon Nature, but the real children of Nature—­or she loves them best—­are those who have the careless chatter, the ready laugh, bright welcome for a holiday.  In catching the hour, we are surely the bloom of the hour?  Why, yes, and no need to lose the rosy wisdom of the children when we wrap ourselves in the patched old cloak of the man’s.

On he went to his conclusions; but the Dame will have none of them, though here was a creature bent on masonry-work in his act of thinking, to build a traveller’s-rest for thinkers behind him; while the volatile were simply breaking their bubbles.

He was discontented all day, both with himself and the sentences he coined.  A small street-boy at his run along the pavement nowhither, distanced him altogether in the race for the great Secret; precipitating the thought, that the conscious are too heavily handicapped.  The unburdened unconscious win the goal.  Ay, but they leave no legacy.  So we must fret and stew, and look into ourselves, and seize the brute and scourge him, just to make one serviceable step forward:  that is, utter a single sentence worth the pondering for guidance.

Gower imagined the fun upon middle Thames:  the vulcan face of Captain Abrane; the cries of his backers, the smiles of the ladies, Lord Fleetwood’s happy style in the teeth of tattlean Aurora’s chariot for overriding it.  One might hope, might almost see, that he was coming to his better senses on a certain subject.  As for style overriding the worst of indignities, has not Scotia given her poet to the slack dependant of the gallows-tree, who so rantingly played his jig and wheeled it round in the shadow of that institution?  Style was his, he hit on the right style to top the situation, and perpetually will he slip his head out of the noose to dance the poet’s verse.

In fact, style is the mantle of greatness; and say that the greatness is beyond our reach, we may at least pray to have the mantle.