. He surveyed his England with
a ruddy countenance, and saw the country in the reflection. His England
saw much of itself in him. Behind each there was more, behind the
country a great deal more, than could be displayed by a glass. The
salient features wore a resemblance. Prosperity and heartiness; a ready
hand on, and over, a full purse; a recognised ability of the second-rate
order; a stout hold of patent principles; inherited and embraced, to
make the day secure and supply a somniferous pillow for the night;
occasional fits of anxiety about affairs, followed by an illuminating
conviction that the world is a changing one and our construction not of
granite, nevertheless that a justifiable faith in the ship, joined to
a constant study of the chart, will pull us through, as it has done
before, despite all assaults and underminings of the common enemy and
the particular; these, with the humorous indifference of familiarity and
constitutional annoyances, excepting when they grew acute and called for
drugs, and with friendliness to the race of man of both colours, in the
belief that our Creator originally composed in black and white, together
with a liking for matters on their present footing in slow motion,
partly under his conductorship, were the prominent characteristics of
the grandson of the founder of the house, who had built it from a spade.

The story of the building was notorious; popular books for the inciting
of young Englishmen to dig to fortune had a place for it among the
chapters, where we read of the kind of man, and the means by which the
country has executed its later giant strides of advancement. The first
John Mattock was a representative of his time; he moved when the
country was moving, and in the right direction, finding himself at the
auspicious moment upon a line of rail. Elsewhere he would have moved,
we may suppose, for the spade-like virtues bear their fruits; persistent
and thrifty, solid and square, will fetch some sort of yield out of any
soil; but he would not have gone far. The Lord, to whom an old man of a
mind totally Hebrew ascribed the plenitude of material success, the
Lord and he would have reared a garden in the desert; in proximity to an
oasis, still on the sands, against obstacles. An accumulation of upwards
of four hundred thousand pounds required, as the moral of the popular
books does not sufficiently indicate, a moving country, an ardent
sphere, to produce the sum: and since, wh