"My dear Doctor, what a splendid opportunity for you to make a revolutionary speech to so large an assembly."
"Yes, indeed!" said the Doctor. "A capital opening for a martyr to the cause. How quickly the populace would have torn me to pieces! But, in sober seriousness, I am not the man I used to be. On this island you doff the revolutionary garment, as snakes do their enamelled skin. When fresh from Germany, I was red and shaggy, as Esau of old; for on the other side of the Channel, affairs were really too lamentable and disgraceful. But, after my first four weeks among these smooth-shaved and really-constitutionally-governed barbarians, I, too, became smooth and mannerly, as Jacob the Patriarch. Another year will make me a constitutional monarchist, and a score of years or so will convert me into an absolutist of Montalembert's stamp. Isn't it disgusting! This impertinently, carefully-observed constitution of the English tears my republican toga into shreds, as day follows day. Only think," continued the Doctor, "of addressing revolutionary observations to these contented Englishmen! It's the most insane idea that I ever heard of! Are revolutions to be stamped out of the soil? Can they thrive without sunlight and rain, without provocation from the higher regions? The mob of our stamp have never yet made a revolution: kings make them. Of course they know not what they do."
There is no stopping the Doctor when he once begins to speak. In his conversations with his German friends, he is eloquent on the merits of England; but at Sir John's tea-table he fights tooth and nail for his beloved Germany. Quite a psychological phenomenon, which may be observed in the majority of the better class of German residents in England.
We walk slowly forward, and leave the park by the gate at Hyde Park Corner. The roads are now empty, for wealth and fashion have gone home to their dinners; and the hackney-coaches and omnibuses are not permitted to enter the sacred precincts. Enormous crowds of these excluded plebeian vehicles are collected at the gate, and move about wildly, to the manifest danger of all those who wish to cross the road. And high above the tumultuous movement and the crowd stands the equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, almost opposite to Apsley House, in which the great warrior lived at the time this chapter was penned by the author.