“I understand he has got a very brilliant young fellow to edit it, who can write the highest style of leading article, quite equal to anything in the London papers.  And he means to take very high ground on Reform.”

“Let Brooke reform his rent-roll.  He’s a cursed old screw, and the buildings all over his estate are going to rack.  I suppose this young fellow is some loose fish from London.”

“His name is Ladislaw.  He is said to be of foreign extraction.”

“I know the sort,” said Mr. Hawley; “some emissary.  He’ll begin with flourishing about the Rights of Man and end with murdering a wench.  That’s the style.”

“You must concede that there are abuses, Hawley,” said Mr. Hackbutt, foreseeing some political disagreement with his family lawyer.  “I myself should never favor immoderate views—­in fact I take my stand with Huskisson—­but I cannot blind myself to the consideration that the non-representation of large towns—­”

“Large towns be damned!” said Mr. Hawley, impatient of exposition.  “I know a little too much about Middlemarch elections.  Let ’em quash every pocket borough to-morrow, and bring in every mushroom town in the kingdom—­they’ll only increase the expense of getting into Parliament.  I go upon facts.”

Mr. Hawley’s disgust at the notion of the “Pioneer” being edited by an emissary, and of Brooke becoming actively political—­ as if a tortoise of desultory pursuits should protrude its small head ambitiously and become rampant—­was hardly equal to the annoyance felt by some members of Mr. Brooke’s own family.  The result had oozed forth gradually, like the discovery that your neighbor has set up an unpleasant kind of manufacture which will be permanently under your nostrils without legal remedy.  The “Pioneer” had been secretly bought even before Will Ladislaw’s arrival, the expected opportunity having offered itself in the readiness of the proprietor to part with a valuable property which did not pay; and in the interval since Mr. Brooke had written his invitation, those germinal ideas of making his mind tell upon the world at large which had been present in him from his younger years, but had hitherto lain in some obstruction, had been sprouting under cover.

The development was much furthered by a delight in his guest which proved greater even than he had anticipated.  For it seemed that Will was not only at home in all those artistic and literary subjects which Mr. Brooke had gone into at one time, but that he was strikingly ready at seizing the points of the political situation, and dealing with them in that large spirit which, aided by adequate memory, lends itself to quotation and general effectiveness of treatment.

“He seems to me a kind of Shelley, you know,” Mr. Brooke took an opportunity of saying, for the gratification of Mr. Casaubon.  “I don’t mean as to anything objectionable—­laxities or atheism, or anything of that kind, you know—­Ladislaw’s sentiments in every way I am sure are good—­indeed, we were talking a great deal together last night.  But he has the same sort of enthusiasm for liberty, freedom, emancipation—­a fine thing under guidance—­ under guidance, you know.  I think I shall be able to put him on the right tack; and I am the more pleased because he is a relation of yours, Casaubon.”