LORD PALMET, AND CERTAIN ELECTORS OF BEVISHAM

Meantime the candidates raised knockers, rang bells, bowed, expounded their views, praised their virtues, begged for votes, and greatly and strangely did the youngest of them enlarge his knowledge of his countrymen.  But he had an insatiable appetite, and except in relation to Mr. Cougham, considerable tolerance.  With Cougham, he was like a young hound in the leash.  They had to run as twins; but Beauchamp’s conjunct would not run, he would walk.  He imposed his experience on Beauchamp, with an assumption that it must necessarily be taken for the law of Beauchamp’s reason in electoral and in political affairs, and this was hard on Beauchamp, who had faith in his reason.  Beauchamp’s early canvassing brought Cougham down to Bevisham earlier than usual in the days when he and Seymour Austin divided the borough, and he inclined to administer correction to the Radically-disposed youngster.  ’Yes, I have gone all over that,’ he said, in speech sometimes, in manner perpetually, upon the intrusion of an idea by his junior.  Cougham also, Cougham had passed through his Radical phase, as one does on the road to wisdom.  So the frog telleth tadpoles:  he too has wriggled most preposterous of tails; and he has shoved a circular flat head into corners unadapted to its shape; and that the undeveloped one should dutifully listen to experience and accept guidance, is devoutly to be hoped.  Alas!  Beauchamp would not be taught that though they were yoked they stood at the opposite ends of the process of evolution.

The oddly coupled pair deplored, among their respective friends, the disastrous Siamese twinship created by a haphazard improvident Liberal camp.  Look at us! they said:—­Beauchamp is a young demagogue; Cougham is chrysalis Tory.  Such Liberals are the ruin of Liberalism; but of such must it be composed when there is no new cry to loosen floods.  It was too late to think of an operation to divide them.  They held the heart of the cause between them, were bound fast together, and had to go on.  Beauchamp, with a furious tug of Radicalism, spoken or performed, pulled Cougham on his beam-ends.  Cougham, to right himself, defined his Liberalism sharply from the politics of the pit, pointed to France and her Revolutions, washed his hands of excesses, and entirely overset Beauchamp.  Seeing that he stood in the Liberal interest, the junior could not abandon the Liberal flag; so he seized it and bore it ahead of the time, there where Radicals trip their phantom dances like shadows on a fog, and waved it as the very flag of our perfectible race.  So great was the impetus that Cougham had no choice but to step out with him briskly—­voluntarily as a man propelled by a hand on his coat-collar.  A word saved him:  the word practical.  ‘Are we practical?’ he inquired, and shivered Beauchamp’s galloping frame with a violent application of the stop abrupt; for that question, ‘Are we practical?’ penetrates the bosom of an English audience, and will surely elicit a response if not. plaudits.  Practical or not, the good people affectingly wish to be thought practical.  It has been asked by them