There in a chime it hangs for a moment, and so
comes dropping--dropping--back to us until:
"Quite through our streets, with silver sound"
The flood of laughter flows, and for weeks the narrow roadways, the
quays and alleys catch and hold its refluent echoes. Your true
Trojan, in short, will don and doff his folly as a garment. Do you
meet him, grave as a judge, with compressed lip and corrugated brow?
Stand aside, I warn you: his fit is on him, and he may catch you up
with him to heights where the ridiculous and the sublime are one and
all the Olympians as drunk as Chloe. Better, if you have no head for
heights, wait and listen for the moment--it will surely come--when
the bubble cracks, and with a laugh he is sane, hilariously sane.
Just here it was that our Mayor fell out with our _genius loci_.
He could smile--paternally, magisterially, benignantly, gallantly,
with patronage, in deprecation, compassionately, disdainfully (as
when he happened to mention Napoleon Bonaparte); subtly and with
intention; or frankly, in mere _bonhomie_; as a Man, as a Major, as a
Mayor. But he was never known to laugh.
Through this weakness he fell. But he was a great man, and it took
the Millennium-nothing less--to undo him.
Here let me say, once for all, that the Millennium was no invention
of ours. It started with the Vicar of Helleston, and we may wash our
hands of it.
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