But they do.  Art has a hold of them.  They pay for it; and the thing purchased grapples.  It will get to their bosoms to breathe from them in time:  entirely overcoming the taste for feudalism, which still a little objects to see their born gentleman acting as leader of musicians.  A people of slow movement, developing tardily, their country is wanting in the distincter features, from being always in the transitional state, like certain sea-fish rolling head over-you know not head from tail.  Without the Welsh, Irish, Scot; in their composition, there would not be much of the yeasty ferment:  but it should not be forgotten that Welsh, Irish, Scot, are now largely of their numbers; and the taste for elegance, and for spiritual utterance, for Song, nay, for Ideas, is there among them, though it does not everywhere cover a rocky surface to bewitch the eyes of aliens;—­like Louise de Seilles and Dr. Schlesien, for example; aliens having no hostile disposition toward the people they were compelled to criticize; honourably granting, that this people has a great history.  Even such has the Lion, with Homer for the transcriber of his deeds.  But the gentle aliens would image our emergence from wildness as the unsocial spectacle presented by the drear menagerie Lion, alone or mated; with hardly an animated moment save when the raw red joint is beneath his paw, reminding him of the desert’s pasture.

Nevertheless, where Strength is, there is hope:—­it may be said more truly than of the breath of Life; which is perhaps but the bucket of breath, muddy with the sediment of the well:  whereas we have in Strength a hero, if a malefactor; whose muscles shall haul him up to the light he will prove worthy of, when that divinity has shown him his uncleanness.  And when Strength is not exercising, you are sure to see Satirists jump on his back.  Dozens, foreign and domestic, are on the back of Old England; a tribute to our quality if at the same time an irritating scourge.  The domestic are in excess; and let us own that their view of the potentate, as an apathetic beast of power, who will neither show the power nor woo the graces; pretending all the while to be eminently above the beast, and posturing in an inefficient mimicry of the civilized, excites to satire.  Colney Durance had his excuses.  He could point to the chief creative minds of the country for generations, as beginning their survey genially, ending venomously, because of an exasperating unreason and scum in the bubble of the scenes, called social, around them.  Viola under his chin, he gazed along the crowded hall, which was to him a rich national pudding of the sycophants, the hypocrites, the burlies, the idiots; dregs of the depths and froth of the surface; bowing to one, that they may scorn another; instituting a Charity, for their poorer fawning fellows to relieve their purses and assist them in tricking the world and their Maker:  and so forth, a tiresome tirade:  and as it was not on his lips, but in the stomach of the painful creature, let him grind that hurdy-gurdy for himself.  His friend Victor set it stirring:  Victor had here what he aimed at!