and the house has been pretty fairly insured.  Shrieking in it is an annoyance to the inmates, nonsensical; weeping is a sickly business.  The times are against Radicalism to the full as much as great oratory is opposed to extremes.  These drag the orator too near to the matter.  So it is that one Radical speech is amazingly like another—­they all have the earth-spots.  They smell, too; they smell of brimstone.  Soaring is impossible among that faction; but this they can do, they can furnish the Tory his opportunity to soar.  When hear you a thrilling Tory speech that carries the country with it, save when the incendiary Radical has shrieked?  If there was envy in the soul of Timothy, it was addressed to the fine occasions offered to the Tory speaker for vindicating our ancient principles and our sacred homes.  He admired the tone to be assumed for that purpose:  it was a good note.  Then could the Tory, delivering at the right season the Shakesperian ‘This England . . .’ and Byronic—­’The inviolate Island . . .’ shake the frame, as though smiting it with the tail of the gymnotus electricus.  Ah, and then could he thump out his Horace, the Tory’s mentor and his cordial, with other great ancient comic and satiric poets, his old Port of the classical cellarage, reflecting veneration upon him who did but name them to an audience of good dispositions.  The Tory possessed also an innate inimitably easy style of humour, that had the long reach, the jolly lordly indifference, the comfortable masterfulness, of the whip of a four-in-hand driver, capable of flicking and stinging, and of being ironically caressing.  Timothy appreciated it, for he had winced under it.  No professor of Liberalism could venture on it, unless it were in the remote district of a back parlour, in the society of a cherishing friend or two, and with a slice of lemon requiring to be refloated in the glass.

But gifts of this description were of a minor order.  Liberalism gave the heading cry, devoid of which parties are dogs without a scent, orators mere pump-handles.  The Tory’s cry was but a whistle to his pack, the Radical howled to the moon like any chained hound.  And no wonder, for these parties had no established current, they were as hard-bound waters; the Radical being dyked and dammed most soundly, the Tory resembling a placid lake of the plains, fed by springs and no confluents.  For such good reasons, Mr. Timothy rejoiced in the happy circumstances which had expelled him from the shores of his native isle to find a refuge and a vocation in Manchester at a period when an orator happened to be in request because dozens were wanted.  That centre of convulsions and source of streams possessed the statistical orator, the reasoning orator, and the inspired; with others of quality; and yet it had need of an ever-ready spontaneous imperturbable speaker, whose bubbling generalizations and ability to beat the drum humorous could swing halls of meeting