The truth was mounted on an unusually high wind.  It was indeed a leading article of a banner-like bravery, and the unrolling of it was designed to stir emotions.  Beauchamp was the theme.  Nevil had it under his eyes earlier than Cecil.  The paper was brought into his room with the beams of day, damp from the presses of the Bevisham Gazette, exactly opposite to him in the White Hart Hotel, and a glance at the paragraphs gave him a lively ardour to spring to his feet.  What writing!  He was uplifted as ‘The heroical Commander Beauchamp, of the Royal Navy,’ and ’Commander Beauchamp, R.N., a gentleman of the highest connections’:  he was ’that illustrious Commander Beauchamp, of our matchless, navy, who proved on every field of the last glorious war of this country that the traditional valour of the noble and indomitable blood transmitted to his veins had lost none of its edge and weight since the battle-axes of the Lords de Romfrey, ever to the fore, clove the skulls of our national enemy on the wide and fertile campaigns of France.’  This was pageantry.

There was more of it.  Then the serious afflatus of the article condescended, as it were, to blow a shrill and well-known whistle:—­the study of the science of navigation made by Commander Beauchamp, R.N., was cited for a jocose warranty of a seaman’s aptness to assist in steering the Vessel of the State.  After thus heeling over, to tip a familiar wink to the multitude, the leader tone resumed its fit deportment.  Commander Beauchamp, in responding to the invitation of the great and united Liberal party of the borough of Bevisham, obeyed the inspirations of genius, the dictates of humanity, and what he rightly considered the paramount duty, as it is the proudest ambition, of the citizen of a free country.

But for an occasional drop and bump of the sailing gasbag upon catch-words of enthusiasm, which are the rhetoric of the merely windy, and a collapse on a poetic line, which too often signalizes the rhetorician’s emptiness of his wind, the article was eminent for flight, sweep, and dash, and sailed along far more grandly than ordinary provincial organs for the promoting or seconding of public opinion, that are as little to be compared with the mighty metropolitan as are the fife and bugle boys practising on their instruments round melancholy outskirts of garrison towns with the regimental marching full band under the presidency of its drum-major.  No signature to the article was needed for Bevisham to know who had returned to the town to pen it.  Those long-stretching sentences, comparable to the very ship Leviathan, spanning two Atlantic billows, appertained to none but the renowned Mr. Timothy Turbot, of the Corn Law campaigns, Reform agitations, and all manifestly popular movements requiring the heaven-endowed man of speech, an interpreter of multitudes, and a prompter.  Like most men who have little to say, he was an orator in print, but that was a poor medium for him—­his body