They discoursed of the poor and their beverages, of pothouses, of the anti-liquorites, and of the duties of parsons, and the value of a robust and right-minded body of the poor to the country.  Palmet found himself following them into a tolerably spacious house that he took to be the old gentleman’s until some of the apparatus of an Institute for literary and scientific instruction revealed itself to him, and he heard Mr. Tomlinson exalt the memory of one Wingham for the blessing bequeathed by him to the town of Bevisham.  ‘For,’ said Mr. Tomlinson, ’it is open to both sexes, to all respectable classes, from ten in the morning up to ten at night.  Such a place affords us, I would venture to say, the advantages without the seductions of a Club.  I rank it next—­at a far remove, but next-the church.’

Lord Palmet brought his eyes down from the busts of certain worthies ranged along the top of the book-shelves to the cushioned chairs, and murmured, ‘Capital place for an appointment with a woman.’

Mr. Tomlinson gazed up at him mildly, with a fallen countenance.  He turned sadly agape in silence to the busts, the books, and the range of scientific instruments, and directed a gaze under his eyebrows at Beauchamp.  ‘Does your friend canvass with you?’ he inquired.

‘I want him to taste it,’ Beauchamp replied, and immediately introduced the affable young lord—­a proceeding marked by some of the dexterity he had once been famous for, as was shown by a subsequent observation of Mr. Tomlinson’s: 

‘Yes,’ he said, on the question of classes, ’yes, I fear we have classes in this country whose habitual levity sharp experience will have to correct.  I very much fear it.’

’But if you have classes that are not to face realities classes that look on them from the box-seats of a theatre,’ said Beauchamp, ’how can you expect perfect seriousness, or any good service whatever?’

’Gently, sir, gently.  No; we can, I feel confident, expand within the limits of our most excellent and approved Constitution.  I could wish that socially . . . that is all.’

‘Socially and politically mean one thing in the end,’ said Beauchamp.  ’If you have a nation politically corrupt, you won’t have a good state of morals in it, and the laws that keep society together bear upon the politics of a country.’

‘True; yes,’ Mr. Tomlinson hesitated assent.  He dissociated Beauchamp from Lord Palmet, but felt keenly that the latter’s presence desecrated Wingham’s Institute, and he informed the candidate that he thought he would no longer detain him from his labours.

‘Just the sort of place wanted in every provincial town,’ Palmet remarked by way of a parting compliment.

Mr. Tomlinson bowed a civil acknowledgement of his having again spoken.

No further mention was made of the miraculous vote which had risen responsive to the candidate’s address of its own inspired motion; so Beauchamp said, ’I beg you to bear in mind that I request you not to plump.’