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.'
Another voice was that of the Corn Law convert, whose phantom he had just seen in the quadrangle
with a great bell. Jude thought his soul might have been shaping the historic words of his master-speech:
`Sir, I may be wrong, but my impression is that my duty towards a country threatened with famine requires
that that which has been the ordinary remedy under all similar circumstances should be resorted to
now, namely, that there should be free access to the food of man from whatever quarter it may come....
Deprive me of office to-morrow, you can never deprive me of the consciousness that I have exercised
the powers committed to me from no corrupt or interested motives, from no desire to gratify ambition, for
no personal gain.'
Then the sly author of the immortal Chapter on Christianity: `How shall we excuse the supine inattention
of the Pagan and philosophic world, to those evidences [miracles] which were presented by Omnipotence?
... The sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and appeared unconscious of
any alterations in the moral or physical government of the world.'