d the colonnade of
the Opera House. The crowd there was so dense that his footsteps were
arrested, and he leaned against one of the columns in admiration of the
various galaxies in view. In front blazed the rival stars of the United
Service Club and the Athenaeum; to the left, the quaint and peculiar
device which lighted up Northumberland House; to the right, the anchors,
cannons, and bombs which typified ingeniously the martial attributes of
the Ordnance Office.

At that moment there were three persons connected with this narrative
within a few feet of each other, distinguished from the multitude by the
feelings with which each regarded the scene, and felt the jostle of the
crowd. Percival St. John, in whom the harmless sense of pleasure was
yet vivid and unsatiated, caught from the assemblage only that physical
hilarity which heightened his own spirits. If in a character as yet so
undeveloped, to which the large passions and stern ends of life were
as yet unknown, stirred some deeper and more musing thoughts and
speculations, giving gravity to the habitual smile on his rosy lip, and
steadying the play of his sparkling eyes, he would have been at a loss
himself to explain the dim sentiment and the vague desire.

Screened by another column from the pressure of the mob, with his arms
folded on his breast, a man some few years older in point of
time,--many years older in point of character,--gazed (with thoughts how
turbulent,--with ambition how profound!) upon the dense and dark masses
that covered space and street far as the eye could reach. He, indeed,
could not have said, with Varney, that he was "at home in a crowd." For
a crowd did not fill him with the sense of his own individual being
and importance, but grappled him to its mighty breast with the thousand
tissues of a common destiny. Who shall explain and disentangle those
high and restless and interwoven emotions with which intellectual
ambition, honourable and ardent, gazes upon that solemn thing with
which, in which, for which it lives and labours,--the Human Multitude?
To that abstracted, solitary man, the illumination, the festivity, the
curiosity, the holiday, were nothing, or but as fleeting phantoms and
vain seemings. In his heart's eye he saw before him but the PEOPLE, the
shadow of an everlasting audience,--audience at once and judge.

And literally touching him as he stood, the ragged sweeper, who had
returned in vain to devote a last care to his belo