He regarded the statesmen in their various types, men of firmer
movement and less dreamy air; the scholar, the speaker, the plodder;
the man whose mind grew with his growth in years, and the man whose
mind contracted with the same.
The scientists and philologists followed on in his mind-sight in
an odd impossible combination, men of meditative faces, strained
foreheads, and weak-eyed as bats with constant research;
then official characters--such men as governor-generals and
lord-lieutenants, in whom he took little interest; chief-justices and
lord chancellors, silent thin-lipped figures of whom he knew barely
the names. A keener regard attached to the prelates, by reason of
his own former hopes. Of them he had an ample band--some men of
heart, others rather men of head; he who apologized for the Church
in Latin; the saintly author of the Evening Hymn; and near them the
great itinerant preacher, hymn-writer, and zealot, shadowed like Jude
by his matrimonial difficulties.
Jude found himself speaking out loud, holding conversations with
them as it were, like an actor in a melodrama who apostrophizes the
audience on the other side of the footlights; till he suddenly ceased
with a start at his absurdity. Perhaps those incoherent words of the
wanderer were heard within the walls by some student or thinker over
his lamp; and he may have raised his head, and wondered what voice it
was, and what it betokened. Jude now perceived that, so far as solid
flesh went, he had the whole aged city to himself with the exception
of a belated townsman here and there, and that he seemed to be
catching a cold.
A voice reached him out of the shade; a real and local voice: "You've been a-settin' a long time on that plinth-stone, young man.
What med you be up to?"
It came from a policeman who had been observing Jude without the
latter observing him.
Jude went home and to bed, after reading up a little about these men
and their several messages to the world from a book or two that he
had brought with him concerning the sons of the university. As he
drew towards sleep various memorable words of theirs that he had
just been conning seemed spoken by them in muttering utterances;
some audible, some unintelligible to him. One of the spectres (who
afterwards mourned Christminster as "the home of lost causes," though
Jude did not remember this) was now apostrophizing her thus: "Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce
intellectual life of our century, so serene! ... Her ineffable charm
keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to
perfection."