But a Journal that should be actually independent of circulation and advertisements:  a popular journal in the true sense, very lungs to the people, for them to breathe freely through at last, and be heard out of it, with well-paid men of mark to head and aid them;—­the establishment of such a Journal seemed to him brave work of a life, though one should die early.  The money launching it would be coin washed pure of its iniquity of selfish reproduction, by service to mankind.  This dawn of his conception stood over him like a rosier Aurora for the country.  He beheld it in imagination as a new light rising above hugeous London.  You turn the sheets of the dawn, and it is the manhood of the land addressing you, no longer that alternately puling and insolent cry of the coffers.  The health, wealth, comfort, contentment of the greater number are there to be striven for, in contempt of compromise and ‘unseasonable times.’

Beauchamp’s illuminated dream of the power of his dawn to vitalize old England, liberated him singularly from his wearing regrets and heart-sickness.

Surely Cecilia, who judged him sincere, might be bent to join hands with him for so good a work!  She would bring riches to her husband:  sufficient.  He required the ablest men of the country to write for him, and it was just that they should be largely paid.  They at least in their present public apathy would demand it.  To fight the brewers, distillers, publicans, the shopkeepers, the parsons, the landlords, the law limpets, and also the indifferents, the logs, the cravens and the fools, high talent was needed, and an ardour stimulated by rates of pay outdoing the offers of the lucre-journals.  A large annual outlay would therefore be needed; possibly for as long as a quarter of a century.  Cecilia and her husband would have to live modestly.  But her inheritance would be immense.  Colonel Halkett had never spent a tenth of his income.  In time he might be taught to perceive in the dawn the one greatly beneficent enterprise of his day.  He might through his daughter’s eyes, and the growing success of the Journal.  Benevolent and gallant old man, patriotic as he was, and kind at heart, he might learn to see in the dawn a broader channel of philanthropy and chivalry than any we have yet had a notion of in England!—­a school of popular education into the bargain.

Beauchamp reverted to the shining curl.  It could not have been clearer to vision if it had lain under his eyes.

Ay, that first wild life of his was dead.  He had slain it.  Now for the second and sober life!  Who can say?  The Countess of Romfrey suggested it:—­Cecilia may have prompted him in his unknown heart to the sacrifice of a lawless love, though he took it for simply barren iron duty.  Brooding on her, he began to fancy the victory over himself less and less a lame one:  for it waxed less and less difficult in his contemplation of it.  He was looking forward instead of back.