failure with the public, of course! However, he seems to seem wise with
you. The poor old fellow gets his trouncing from the critics monthly.
See Colney to-morrow, my love. Now go to sleep. We have got over the
worst. I speak at my Meeting to-morrow and am a champagne-bottle of
notes and points for them.'

His lost Idea drew close to him in sleep: or he thought so, when awaking
to the conception of a people solidified, rich and poor, by the common
pride of simple manhood. But it was not coloured, not a luminous globe:
and the people were in drab, not a shining army on the march to meet the
Future. It looked like a paragraph in a newspaper, upon which a Leading
Article sits, dutifully arousing the fat worm of sarcastic humour under
the ribs of cradled citizens, with an exposure of its excellent folly.
He would not have it laughed at; still he could not admit it as more than
a skirt of the robe of his Idea. For let none think him a mere City
merchant, millionnaire, boon-fellow, or music-loving man of the world.
He had ideas to shoot across future Ages;--provide against the shrinkage
of our Coal-beds; against, and for, if you like, the thickening,
jumbling, threatening excess of population in these Islands, in Europe,
America, all over our habitable sphere. Now that Mrs. Burman, on her way
to bliss, was no longer the dungeon-cell for the man he would show
himself to be, this name for successes, corporate nucleus of the
enjoyments, this Victor Montgomery Radnor, intended impressing himself
upon the world as a factory of ideas. Colney's insolent charge, that
the English have no imagination--a doomed race, if it be true!--would be
confuted. For our English require but the lighted leadership to come
into cohesion, and step ranked, and chant harmoniously the song of their
benevolent aim. And that astral head giving, as a commencement, example
of the right use of riches, the nation is one, part of the riddle of the
future solved.