Yes, well, and if a tumble distorts our ideas of life, and an odd word engrosses our speculations, we are poor creatures, he addressed another friend, from whom he stood constitutionally in dissent naming him Colney; and under pressure of the name, reviving old wrangles between them upon man’s present achievements and his probable destinies:  especially upon England’s grandeur, vitality, stability, her intelligent appreciation of her place in the universe; not to speak of the historic dignity of London City.  Colney had to be overcome 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.