One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
Pledged to each other and against the world
With mutual union.
One would like to think of the lengthened tide-flux of
pedestrian citizens facing South-westward, as being drawn
by devout attraction to our nourishing luminary: at the hour,
mark, when the Norland cloud-king, after a day of wild invasion,
sits him on his restful bank of bluefish smack-o’-cheek
red above Whitechapel, to spy where his last puff of icy javelins
pierces and dismembers the vapoury masses in cluster
about the circle of flame descending upon the greatest and
most elevated of Admirals at the head of the Strand, with
illumination of smoke-plumed chimneys, house-roofs, window-panes,
weather-vanes, monument and pedimental monsters,
and omnibus umbrella. One would fair believe that
they advance admireing; they are assuredly made handsome
by the beams. No longer mere concurrent atoms of the furnace
of business (from coal-dust to sparks, rushing, as it were,
on respiratory blasts of an enormous engine’s centripetal and
centrifugal energy), their step is leisurely to meet the rosy
Dinner, which is ever a see-saw with the God of Light in his
fall; the mask of the noble human visage upon them is not
roughened, as at midday, by those knotted hard ridges of the
scrambler’s hand seen from forehead down to jaw; when indeed
they have all the appearance of sour scientific productions.
And unhappily for the national portrait, in the Poem
quoted, the Rajah’s Minister chose an hour between morning
and meridian, or at least before an astonished luncheon
had come to composure inside their persons, for drawing his
Master’s attention to the quaint similarity of feature in the
units of the busy antish congregates they had travelled so far
to visit and to study:
These Britons wear
The driven and perplexed look of men
Begotten hastily ‘twixt business hours
It could not have been late afternoon.
These Orientals should have seen them, with Victor Radnor
among them, fronting the smoky splendours of the sunset.
In April, the month of piled and hurried cloud, it is a Rape
of the Sabines overhead from all quarters, either one of the
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