I will not weary my readers with the story of the founding of _Criticism_; of the resuscitation of the old _Orb_, or of that vigorous off-shoot of Colonial enterprise, the London edition of the _M’Korio Times_, It is enough to say that, in all this mass of ephemeral literature, the last journal alone was directly founded by Mr Barnett; and, as it dealt principally with the City, it had but little effect upon the general current of opinion. All this intellectual movement was instinct with the spirit of England. There are political forces that seem without form, very vague and viewless as great currents of air may be, but they are as irresistible. Through England and the English some such force has long been stirring. All these young men had felt it; all were bound as by a kind of fate to express it. It coloured their writing upon every topic. It troubled their view of the future; it compelled them to continual appeals. For long that undefined and natural thing, that impulse of patriotism, had wandered in vagaries, thinking that now here, now there, it had found the substance which it should inspire, the matter which it was destined to make live. So all great movements begin. At last, and not long after the advent into English journalism of that younger life and keener enthusiasm which I have just described, a true and permanent object absorbed its energies, and, if one may use the phrase, the nation and her servants had found their mission. The full meaning of the M’Korio Delta had appeared. FOOTNOTES: [6] As an example of the lengths to which folly can go, I may quote the accusation made against Mr Barnett that he influenced three of the great dailies upon a critical date by _threatening to cut off their supply of paper_!!! CHAPTER V In the first few months after his success in the University examinations, Cosmo lived a life which should have proved a fitting introduction to the position his father had reserved for him. With the middle of October he entered the business in Thames Street, and displayed an assiduity delightful for Mr Burden to witness. The merchant was, indeed, astonished at the aptitude, or, perhaps, the inherited commercial talent, which had survived his son’s philological training, and was at times prepared to admit that the study of modern languages, even upon the side of pure literature, served (as he had often heard from its defenders) for a gymnastic to the growing mind.