in and out of
which I see a pair of figures quite up to the dramatic mark flit again
with their air of the very rightest finish. I must but note these
things, none the less, and pass; for scarce another item of the whole
Boulogne concert of salient images failed, after all, of a significance
either still more strangely social or more distinctively spectacular.
These appearances indeed melt together for my interest, I once more
feel, as, during the interminable stretch of the prescribed and for the
most part solitary airings and outings involved in my slow convalescence
from the extremity of fever, I approached that straitened and somewhat
bedarkened issue of the Rue de l'Ecu (was it?) toward the
bright-coloured, strongly-peopled Port just where Merridew's English
Library, solace of my vacuous hours and temple, in its degree too, of
deep initiations, mounted guard at the right. Here, frankly,
discrimination drops--every particular in the impression once so quick
and fresh sits interlinked with every other in the large lap of the
whole. The motley, sunny, breezy, bustling Port, with its classic, its
admirable fisher-folk of both sexes, models of type and tone and of what
might be handsomest in the thoroughly weathered condition, would have
seemed the straightest appeal to curiosity had not the old Thackerayan
side, as I may comprehensively call it, and the scattered wealth of
illustration of _his_ sharpest satiric range, not so constantly
interposed and competed with it. The scene bristled, as I look back at
it, with images from Men's Wives, from the society of Mr. Deuceace and
that of fifty other figures of the same creation, with Bareacreses and
Rawdon Crawleys and of course with Mrs. Macks, with Roseys of a more or
less crumpled freshness and blighted bloom, with battered and bent,
though doubtless never quite so fine, Colonel Newcomes not less; with
more reminders in short than I can now gather in. Of those forms of the
seedy, the subtly sinister, the vainly "genteel," the generally damaged
and desperate, and in particular perhaps the invincibly impudent, all
the marks, I feel sure, were stronger and straighter than such as we
meet in generally like cases under our present levelling light. Such
anointed and whiskered and eked-out, such brazen, bluffing, swaggering
gentlemen, such floridly repaired ladies, their mates, all looking as
hard as they could as if they were there for mere harmless amusement--it
was as good,