heard casual
remarks on the respectable City of London merchant from Colney Durance.
A short analytical gaze at him, helped to an estimate of the powers
of the man who kept him up. Mr. Inchling was a florid City-feaster,
descendant of a line of City merchants, having features for a wife to
identify; as drovers, they tell us, can single one from another of their
round-bellied beasts. Formerly the leader of the Firm, he was now, after
dreary fits of restiveness, kickings, false prophecies of ruin, Victor's
obedient cart-horse. He sighed in set terms for the old days of the
Firm, when, like trouts in the current, the Firm had only to gape for
shoals of good things to fatten it: a tale of English prosperity in
quiescence; narrated interjectorily among the by-ways of the City, and
wanting only metre to make it our national Poem.

Mr. Inchling did not deny that grand mangers of golden oats were still
somehow constantly allotted to him. His wife believed in Victor,
and deemed the loss of the balancing Pennergate a gain. Since that
lamentable loss, Mr. Inchling, under the irony of circumstances the Tory
of Commerce, had trotted and gallopped whither driven, racing like mad
against his will and the rival nations now in the field to force the
pace; a name for enterprise; the close commercial connection of a man
who speculated--who, to put it plainly, lived on his wits; hurried
onward and onward; always doubting, munching, grumbling at satisfaction,
in perplexity of the gratitude which is apprehensive of black Nemesis at
a turn of the road,--to confound so wild a whip as Victor Radnor. He had
never forgiven the youth's venture in India of an enormous purchase
of Cotton many years back, and which he had repudiated, though not his
share of the hundreds of thousands realized before the refusal to ratify
the bargain had come to Victor. Mr. Inchling dated his first indigestion
from that disquieting period. He assented to the praise of Victor's
genius, admitting benefits; his heart refused to pardon, and
consequently his head wholly to trust, the man who robbed him of his
quondam comfortable feeling of security. And if you will imagine the
sprite of the aggregate English Taxpayer personifying Steam as the
malignant who has despoiled him of the blessed Safety-Assurance he once
had from his God Neptune against invaders, you will comprehend the state
of Mr. Inchling's mind in regard to his terrific and bountiful, but very
disturbing partn