without his fire.  Mr. Timothy’s place was the platform.  A wise discernment, or else a lucky accident (for he came hurriedly from the soil of his native isle, needing occupation), set him on that side in politics which happened to be making an established current and strong headway.  Oratory will not work against the stream, or on languid tides.  Driblets of movements that allowed the world to doubt whether they were so much movements as illusions of the optics, did not suit his genius.  Thus he was a Liberal, no Radical, fountain.  Liberalism had the attraction for the orator of being the active force in politics, between two passive opposing bodies, the aspect of either of which it can assume for a menace to the other, Toryish as against Radicals; a trifle red in the eyes of the Tory.  It can seem to lean back on the Past; it can seem to be amorous of the Future.  It is actually the thing of the Present and its urgencies, therefore popular, pouring forth the pure waters of moderation, strong in their copiousness.  Delicious and rapturous effects are to be produced in the flood of a Liberal oration by a chance infusion of the fierier spirit, a flavour of Radicalism.  That is the thing to set an audience bounding and quirking.  Whereas if you commence by tilling a Triton pitcher full of the neat liquor upon them, ’you have to resort to the natural element for the orator’s art of variation, you are diluted—­and that’s bathos, to quote Mr. Timothy.  It was a fine piece of discernment in him.  Let Liberalism be your feast, Radicalism your spice.  And now and then, off and on, for a change, for diversion, for a new emotion, just for half an hour or so-now and then the Sunday coat of Toryism will give you an air.  You have only to complain of the fit, to release your shoulders in a trice.  Mr. Timothy felt for his art as poets do for theirs, and considered what was best adapted to speaking, purely to speaking.  Upon no creature did he look with such contempt as upon Dr. Shrapnel, whose loose disjunct audiences he was conscious he could, giving the doctor any start he liked, whirl away from him and have compact, enchained, at his first flourish; yea, though they were composed of ‘the poor man,’ with a stomach for the political distillery fit to drain relishingly every private bogside or mountain-side tap in old Ireland in its best days—­the illicit, you understand.

Further, to quote Mr. Timothy’s points of view, the Radical orator has but two notes, and one is the drawling pathetic, and the other is the ultra-furious; and the effect of the former we liken to the English working man’s wife’s hob-set queasy brew of well-meant villany, that she calls by the innocent name of tea; and the latter is to be blown, asks to be blown, and never should be blown without at least seeming to be blown, with an accompaniment of a house on fire.  Sir, we must adapt ourselves to our times.  Perhaps a spark or two does lurk about our house, but we have vigilant watchmen in plenty,