lives and labours,--the Human Multitude? To that abstracted, solitary
man, the illumination, the festivity, the curiosity, the holiday, were
nothing, or but as fleeting phantoms and vain seemings. In his heart's
eye he saw before him but the PEOPLE, the shadow of an everlasting
audience,--audience at once and judge.

And literally touching him as he stood, the ragged sweeper, who had
returned in vain to devote a last care to his beloved charge, stood
arrested with the rest, gazing joylessly on the blazing lamps, dead as
the stones he heeded, to the young vivacity of the one man, the solemn
visions of the other. So, O London, amidst the universal holiday to
monarch and to mob, in those three souls lived the three elements which,
duly mingled and administered, make thy vice and thy virtue, thy glory
and thy shame, thy labour and thy luxury; pervading the palace and the
street, the hospital and the prison,--enjoyment, which is pleasure;
energy, which is action; torpor, which is want!




CHAPTER II.

LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT.

Suddenly across the gaze of Percival St. John there flashed a face that
woke him from his abstraction, as a light awakes the sleeper. It was as
a recognition of something seen dimly before,--a truth coming out from a
dream. It was not the mere beauty of that face (and beautiful it was)
that arrested his eye and made his heart beat more quickly, it was rather
that nameless and inexplicable sympathy which constitutes love at first