terrible
question, with its phrasing of farce and its enigmas of tragical
sense,--"WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?" Do with what? The all that remains to
him, the all he holds! the all which man himself, betwixt Free-will and
Pre-decree, is permitted to do. Ask not the vagrant alone: ask each of
the four there assembled on that flying bridge called the Moment. Time
before thee,--what wilt thou do with it? Ask thyself! ask the wisest!
Out of effort to answer that question, what dream-schools have risen,
never wholly to perish,--the science of seers on the Chaldee's
Pur-Tor, or in the rock-caves of Delphi, gasped after and grasped at by
horn-handed mechanics to-day in their lanes and alleys. To the heart of
the populace sink down the blurred relics of what once was the law of
the secretest sages, hieroglyphical tatters which the credulous vulgar
attempt to interpret. "WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?" Ask Merle and his
Crystal! But the curtain descends! Yet a moment, there they are,--age
and childhood,--poverty, wealth, station, vagabondage; the preacher's
sacred learning and august ambition; fancies of dawning reason; hopes
of intellect matured; memories of existence wrecked; household sorrows;
untold regrets; elegy and epic in low, close, human sighs, to which
Poetry never yet gave voice: all for the moment personified there
before you,--a glimpse for the guess, no more. Lower and lower falls the
curtain! All is blank!

BOOK VI.

CHAPTER I.

Etchings of Hyde Park in the month of June, which, if this history
escapes those villains the trunk-makers, may be of inestimable value
to unborn antiquarians.--Characters, long absent, reappear and give
some account of themselves.

Five years have passed away since this history opened. It is the month
of June once more,--June, which clothes our London in all its glory,
fills its languid ballrooms with living flowers, and its stony causeways
with human butterflies. It is about the hour of six P.M. The lounge in
Hyde Park is crowded; along the road that skirts the Serpentine crawl
the carriages one after the other; congregate by the rails the lazy
lookers-on,--lazy in attitude, but with active eyes, and tongues
sharpened on the whetstone of scandal,--the Scaligers of club windows
airing their vocabulary in the Park. Slowly saunter on foot idlers
of all degrees in the hierarchy of London idlesse: dandies of
established-fame; youthful tyros in their first season. Yonder