One of Our Conquerors | Page 4

afresh, and he fled,
but managed, with two or three of his bitter phrases, to make a
cuttle-fish fight of it, that oppressively shadowed his vanquisher:
The Daniel Lambert of Cities: the Female Annuitant of Nations:--and
such like, wretched stuff, proper to Colney Durance, easily dispersed
and out- laughed when we have our vigour. We have as much as we
need of it in summoning a contemptuous Pooh to our lips, with a shrug
at venomous dyspepsia.
Nevertheless, a malignant sketch of Colney's, in the which Hengist and

Horsa, our fishy Saxon originals, in modern garb of liveryman and
gaitered squire, flat-headed, paunchy, assiduously servile, are shown
blacking Ben-Israel's boots and grooming the princely stud of the Jew,
had come so near to Victor Radnor's apprehensions of a possible, if not
an impending, consummation, that the ghastly vision of the Jew
Dominant in London City, over England, over Europe, America, the
world (a picture drawn in literary sepia by Colney: with our poor hang
neck population uncertain about making a bell-rope of the forelock to
the Satyr-snouty master; and the Norman Lord de Warenne handing
him for a lump sum son and daughter, both to be Hebraized in their
different ways), fastened on the most mercurial of patriotic men, and
gave him a whole-length plunge into despondency.
It lasted nearly a minute. His recovery was not in this instance due to
the calling on himself for the rescue of an ancient and glorious country;
nor altogether to the spectacle of the shipping, over the parapet, to his
right: the hundreds of masts rising out of the merchant river; London's
unrivalled mezzotint and the City' rhetorician's inexhaustible argument:
he gained it rather from the imperious demand of an animated and
thirsty frame for novel impressions. Commonly he was too hot with his
business, and airy fancies above it when crossing the bridge, to reflect
in freshness on its wonders; though a phrase could spring him alive to
them; a suggestion of the Foreigner, jealous, condemned to admire in
despair of outstripping, like Satan worsted; or when a Premier's fine
inflation magnified the scene at City banquets--exciting while audible,
if a waggery in memory; or when England's cherished Bard, the
Leading Article, blew bellows, and wind primed the lieges.
That a phrase on any other subject was of much the same effect, in
relation to it, may be owned; he was lightly kindled. The scene,
however, had a sharp sparkle of attractiveness at the instant. Down
went the twirling horizontal pillars of a strong tide from the arches of
the bridge, breaking to wild water at a remove; and a reddish Northern
cheek of curdling pipeing East, at shrilly puffs between the Tower and
the Custom House, encountered it to whip and ridge the flood against
descending tug and long tail of stern-ajerk empty barges; with a
steamer slowly noseing round off the wharf-cranes, preparing to swirl

the screw; and half-bottom-upward boats dancing harpooner beside
their whale; along an avenue, not fabulously golden, of the deputy
masts of all nations, a wintry woodland, every rag aloft curling to
volume; and here the spouts and the mounds of steam, and rolls of
brown smoke there, variously undulated, curved to vanish; cold blue
sky ashift with the whirl and dash of a very Tartar cavalry of cloud
overhead.
Surely a scene pretending to sublimity?
Gazeing along that grand highway of the voyageing forest, your
London citizen of good estate has reproached his country's poets for not
pouring out, succinctly and melodiously, his multitudinous larvae of
notions begotten by the scene. For there are times when he would, pay
to have them sung; and he feels them big; he thinks them human in
their bulk; they are Londinensian; they want but form and fire to get
them scored on the tablets of the quotable at festive boards. This he can
promise to his poets. As for otherwhere than at the festive, Commerce
invoked is a Goddess that will have the reek of those boards to fill her
nostrils, and poet and alderman alike may be dedicate to the sublime,
she leads them, after two sniffs of an idea concerning her, for the dive
into the turtle- tureen. Heels up they go, poet first--a plummet he!
And besides it is barely possible for our rounded citizen, in the mood of
meditation, to direct his gaze off the bridge along the waterway North-
eastward without beholding as an eye the glow of whitebait's
bow-window by the riverside, to the front of the summer sunset, a
league or so down stream; where he sees, in memory savours, the
Elysian end of Commerce: frontispiece of a tale to fetch us up the
out-wearied spectre of old Apicius; yea, and urge Crispinus to wheel
his purse into the market for the purchase