When Mr. Brooke presented himself on the balcony, the cheers were quite loud enough to counterbalance the yells, groans, brayings, and other expressions of adverse theory, which were so moderate that Mr. Standish (decidedly an old bird) observed in the ear next to him, “This looks dangerous, by God!  Hawley has got some deeper plan than this.”  Still, the cheers were exhilarating, and no candidate could look more amiable than Mr. Brooke, with the memorandum in his breast-pocket, his left hand on the rail of the balcony, and his right trifling with his eye-glass.  The striking points in his appearance were his buff waistcoat, short-clipped blond hair, and neutral physiognomy.  He began with some confidence.

“Gentlemen—­Electors of Middlemarch!”

This was so much the right thing that a little pause after it seemed natural.

“I’m uncommonly glad to be here—­I was never so proud and happy in my life—­never so happy, you know.”

This was a bold figure of speech, but not exactly the right thing; for, unhappily, the pat opening had slipped away—­even couplets from Pope may be but “fallings from us, vanishings,” when fear clutches us, and a glass of sherry is hurrying like smoke among our ideas.  Ladislaw, who stood at the window behind the speaker, thought, “it’s all up now.  The only chance is that, since the best thing won’t always do, floundering may answer for once.”  Mr. Brooke, meanwhile, having lost other clews, fell back on himself and his qualifications—­always an appropriate graceful subject for a candidate.

“I am a close neighbor of yours, my good friends—­you’ve known me on the bench a good while—­I’ve always gone a good deal into public questions—­machinery, now, and machine-breaking—­you’re many of you concerned with machinery, and I’ve been going into that lately.  It won’t do, you know, breaking machines:  everything must go on—­ trade, manufactures, commerce, interchange of staples—­that kind of thing—­since Adam Smith, that must go on.  We must look all over the globe:—­`Observation with extensive view,’ must look everywhere, `from China to Peru,’ as somebody says—­Johnson, I think, `The Rambler,’ you know.  That is what I have done up to a certain point—­not as far as Peru; but I’ve not always stayed at home—­I saw it wouldn’t do.  I’ve been in the Levant, where some of your Middlemarch goods go—­ and then, again, in the Baltic.  The Baltic, now.”

Plying among his recollections in this way, Mr. Brooke might have got along, easily to himself, and would have come back from the remotest seas without trouble; but a diabolical procedure had been set up by the enemy.  At one and the same moment there had risen above the shoulders of the crowd, nearly opposite Mr. Brooke, and within ten yards of him, the effigy of himself:  buff-colored waistcoat, eye-glass, and neutral physiognomy, painted on rag; and there had arisen, apparently in the air, like the note of the cuckoo, a parrot-like, Punch-voiced echo of his