IV

while the coach went from light to darkness down the Haymarket, along the Strand, up Fleet Street, and reached, at length, her house in Blackfriars. For some time the dark spaces between the lamps had been becoming brighter and the lamps themselves less bright⁠—that is to say, the sun was rising, and it was in the equable but confused light of a summer’s morning in which everything is seen but nothing is seen distinctly that they alighted, Mr. Pope handing Orlando from her carriage and Orlando curtseying Mr. Pope to precede her into her mansion with the most scrupulous attention to the rites of the Graces.

From the foregoing passage, however, it must not be supposed that genius (but the disease is now stamped out in the British Isles, the late Lord Tennyson, it is said, being the last person to suffer from it) is constantly alight, for then we should see everything plain and perhaps should be scorched to death in the process. Rather it resembles the lighthouse in its working, which sends one ray and then no more for a time; save that genius is much more capricious in its manifestations and may flash six or seven beams in quick succession (as Mr. Pope did that night) and then lapse into darkness for a year or forever. To steer by its beams is therefore impossible, and when the dark spell is on them men of genius are, it is said, much like other people.