may pronounce the familiar but respectable words, the burial-service of a time so happy!

Mr. Grancey Lespel would still have been sitting for Bevisham (or politely at this elective moment bowing to resume the seat) had not those Manchester jugglers caught up his cry, appropriated his colours, displaced and impersonated him, acting beneficent Whig on a scale approaching treason to the Constitution; leaning on the people in earnest, instead of taking the popular shoulder for a temporary lift, all in high party policy, for the clever manoeuvre, to oust the Tory and sway the realm.  See the consequences.  For power, for no other consideration, those manufacturing rascals have raised Radicalism from its primaeval mire—­from its petty backslum bookseller’s shop and public-house back-parlour effluvia of oratory—­to issue dictates in England, and we, England, formerly the oak, are topsy-turvy, like onions, our heels in the air!

The language of party is eloquent, and famous for being grand at illustration; but it is equally well known that much of it gives us humble ideas of the speaker, probably because of the naughty temper party is prone to; which, while endowing it with vehemence, lessens the stout circumferential view that should be taken, at least historically.  Indeed, though we admit party to be the soundest method for conducting us, party talk soon expends its attractiveness, as would a summer’s afternoon given up to the contemplation of an encounter of rams’ heads.  Let us be quit of Mr. Grancey Lespel’s lamentations.  The Whig gentleman had some reason to complain.  He had been trained to expect no other attack than that of his hereditary adversary-ram in front, and a sham ram—­no honest animal, but a ramming engine rather—­had attacked him in the rear.  Like Mr. Everard Romfrey and other Whigs, he was profoundly chagrined by popular ingratitude:  ‘not the same man,’ his wife said of him.  It nipped him early.  He took to proverbs; sure sign of the sere leaf in a man’s mind.

His wife reproached the people for their behaviour to him bitterly.  The lady regarded politics as a business that helped hunting-men a stage above sportsmen, for numbers of the politicians she was acquainted with were hunting-men, yet something more by virtue of the variety they could introduce into a conversation ordinarily treating of sport and the qualities of wines.  Her husband seemed to have lost in that Parliamentary seat the talisman which gave him notions distinguishing him from country squires; he had sunk, and he no longer cared for the months in London, nor for the speeches she read to him to re-awaken his mind and make him look out of himself, as he had done when he was a younger man and not a suspended Whig.  Her own favourite reading was of love-adventures written in the French tongue.  She had once been in love, and could be so sympathetic with that passion as to avow to Cecilia Halkett a tenderness for Nevil Beauchamp, on account of his relations with the Marquise de Rouaillout, and notwithstanding the demoniacal flame-halo of the Radical encircling him.