spur to purification; and they viewed it as a patch to raise
in relief their goodness. They gazed on it, saw themselves in it, and
veiled it: warned of the cunning of an oft-defeated Tempter.

To do good and sleep well, was their sowing and their reaping. Uneasy
consciences could not have slept. The sleeping served for proof of an
accurate reckoning and an expungeing of the day's debits. They differed
in opinion now and then, as we see companion waves of the river, blown
by a gust, roll a shadow between them; and almost equally transient were
their differences with a world that they condemned when they could not
feel they (as an embodiment of their principles) were leading it. The
English world at times betrayed a restiveness in the walled pathway of
virtue; for, alas, it closely neighbours the French; only a Channel,
often dangerously smooth, to divide: but it is not perverted for long;
and the English Funds are always constant and a tower. Would they be
suffered to be so, if libertinism were in the ascendant?

Colney Durance was acquainted with the Duvidney ladies. Hearing of the
journey to them and the purport of it, he said, with the mask upon glee:
'Then Victor has met his match!' Nataly had sent for him to dine with
her in Victor's absence: she was far from grieved, as to the result, by
his assurance to her, that Victor had not a chance. Colney thought so.
'Just like him! to be off gaily to try and overcome or come over the
greatest power in England.' They were England herself; the squat
old woman she has become by reason of her overlapping numbers of
the comfortable fund-holder annuitants: a vast body of passives and
negatives, living by precept, according to rules of precedent,
and supposing themselves to be righteously guided because of their
continuing undisturbed. Them he branded, as hypocritical materialists,
and the country for pride in her sweetmeat plethora of them:--mixed with
an ancient Hebrew fear of offence to an inscrutable Lord, eccentrically
appeasable through the dreary iteration of the litany of sinfulness. He
was near a truth; and he had the heat of it on him.

Satirists in their fervours might be near it to grasp it, if they could
be moved to moral distinctness, mental intention, with a preference of
strong plain speech over the crack of their whips. Colney could not or
would not praise our modern adventurous, experimental, heroic, tramping
active, as opposed to yonder pursy passives and nega