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, a glow, a significance or a fun, abandoning them where examination is close and constant, and the critic’s trumpet-note dispersed to the thinness of the fee for his blowing.  As to foreign pictures, classic pictures, Victor had known his purse to leap for a Raphael with a history in stages of descent from the Master, and critics to swarm:  a Raphael of the dealers, exposed to be condemned by the critics, universally derided.  A real Raphael in your house is aristocracy to the roof-tree.  But the wealthy trader will reach to title before he may hope to get the real Raphael or a Titian.  Yet he is the one who would, it may be, after enjoyment of his prize, bequeath it to the nation—­presented to the nation by victor Montgomery Radnor.  There stood the letters in gilt; and he had a thrill of his generosity; for few were the generous acts he could not perform; and if an object haunted the deed, it came of his trader’s habit of mind.

He revelled in benevolent projects of gifts to the nation, which would coat a sensitive name.  Say, an ornamental City Square, flowers, fountains, afternoon bands of music—­comfortable seats in it, and a shelter, and a ready supply of good cheap coffee or tea.  Tobacco? why not rolls of honest tobacco! nothing so much soothes the labourer.  A volume of plans for the benefit of London smoked out of each ascending pile in his brain.  London is at night a moaning outcast round the policeman’s’ legs.  What of an all-night-long, cosy, brightly lighted, odoriferous coffee-saloon for rich or poor, on the model of the hospitable Paduan?  Owner of a penny, no soul among us shall be rightly an outcast . . . .