Professional devoutness is deemed more righteous on such occasions than poetic fire.  It robes us in the cloak of the place, as at a funeral.  Generally, Mr. Barmby found, and justly, that it is in superior estimation among his countrymen of all classes.  They are shown by example how to look, think, speak; what to do.  Poets are disturbing; they cannot be comfortably imitated, they are unsafe, not certainly the metal, unless you have Laureates, entitled to speak by their pay and decorations; and these are but one at a time-and a quotation may remind us of a parody, to convulse the sacred dome!  Established plain prose officials do better for our English.  The audience moved round with heads of undertakers.

Victor called to recollection Fenellan’s ‘Rev. Glendoveer’ while Mr. Barmby pursued his discourse, uninterrupted by tripping wags.  And those who have schemes, as well as those who are startled by the criticism in laughter to discover that they have cause for shunning it, rejoice when wits are absent.  Mr. Sowerby and Nesta interchanged a comment on Mr. Barmby’s remarks:  The Fate of Princes!  The Paths of Glory!  St. Louis was a very distant Roman Catholic monarch; and the young gentleman of Evangelical education could admire him as a Crusader.  St. Louis was for Nesta a figure in the rich hues of royal Saintship softened to homeliness by tears.  She doated on a royalty crowned with the Saint’s halo, that swam down to us to lift us through holy human showers.  She listened to Mr. Barmby, hearing few sentences, lending his eloquence all she felt:  he rolled forth notes of a minster organ, accordant with the devotional service she was holding mutely.  Mademoiselle upon St. Louis:  ’Worthy to be named King of Kings!’ swept her to a fount of thoughts, where the thoughts are not yet shaped, are yet in the breast of the mother emotions.  Louise de Seilles had prepared her to be strangely and deeply moved.  The girl had a heart of many strings, of high pitch, open to be musical to simplest wandering airs or to the gales.  This crypt of the recumbent sculptured figures and the coloured series of acts in the passage of the crowned Saint thrilled her as with sight of flame on an altar-piece of History.  But this King in the lines of the Crucifixion leading, gave her a lesson of life, not a message from death.  With such a King, there would be union of the old order and the new, cessation to political turmoil:  Radicalism, Socialism, all the monster names of things with heads agape in these our days to gobble-up the venerable, obliterate the beautiful, leave a stoniness of floods where field and garden were, would be appeased, transfigured.  She hoped, she prayed for that glorious leader’s advent.