CHAPTER IV
IN a year or two more came Waterloo and the European peace. Then Mr.
George Pontifex went abroad more than once. I remember seeing at
Battersby in after-years the diary which he kept on the first of these
occasions. It is a characteristic document. I felt as I read it that
the author before starting had made up his mind to admire only what he
thought it would be creditable in him to admire, to look at nature and
art only through the spectacles that had been handed down to him by
generation after generation of prigs and impostors. The first
glimpse of Mont Blanc threw Mr. Pontifex into a conventional
ecstasy. "My feelings I cannot express. I gasped, yet hardly dared
to breathe, as I viewed for the first time the monarch of the
mountains. I seemed to fancy the genius seated on his stupendous
throne far above his aspiring brethren and in his solitary might
defying the universe. I was so overcome by my feelings that I was
almost bereft of my faculties, and would not for worlds have spoken
after my first exclamation till I found some relief in a gush of
tears. With pain I tore myself from contemplating for the first time
'at distance dimly seen' (though I felt as if I had sent my soul and
eyes after it), this sublime spectacle.
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