A warrior accustomed to wear the burnished breastplates between London and Windsor has, we know, more need to withstand than to discharge the shafts of amorous passion; he is indeed, as an object of beauty, notoriously compelled to be of the fair sex in his tactics, and must practise the arts and whims of nymphs to preserve himself:  and no doubt it was the case with the famous Captain Baskelett, in whose mind sweet ladies held the place that the pensive politician gives to the masses, dreadful in their hatred, almost as dreadful in their affection.  But an heiress is a distinct species among women; he hungered for the heiress; his elevation to Parliament made him regard her as both the ornament and the prop of his position; and it should be added that his pride, all the habits of thought of a conqueror of women, had been shocked by that stupefying rejection of him, which Cecilia had intimated to her father with the mere lowering of her eyelids.  Conceive the highest bidder at an auction hearing the article announce that it will not have him!  Captain Baskelett talked of it everywhere for a month or so:—­the girl could not know her own mind, for she suited him exactly! and he requested the world to partake of his astonishment.  Chronicles of the season in London informed him that he was not the only fellow to whom the gates were shut.  She could hardly be thinking of Nevil?  However, let the epistle be read.  ‘Now for the Shrapnel shot,’ he nodded finally to Colonel Halkett, expanded his bosom, or natural cuirass, as before-mentioned, and was vocable above the common pitch:—­

’"My brave Beauchamp,—­On with your mission, and never a summing of results in hand, nor thirst for prospects, nor counting upon harvests; for seed sown in faith day by day is the nightly harvest of the soul, and with the soul we work.  With the soul we see."’

Captain Baskelett intervened:  ’Ahem!  I beg to observe that this delectable rubbish is underlined by old Nevil’s pencil.’  He promised to do a little roaring whenever it occurred, and continued with ghastly false accentuation, an intermittent sprightliness and depression of tone in the wrong places.

’"The soul,” et caetera.  Here we are!

   “Desires to realize our gains are akin to the passion of usury;
   these are tricks of the usurer to grasp his gold in act and
   imagination.  Have none of them.  Work at the people!”

—­At them, remark!—­

“Moveless do they seem to you?  Why, so is the earth to the sowing husbandman, and though we cannot forecast a reaping season, we have in history durable testification that our seasons come in the souls of men, yea, as a planet that we have set in motion, and faster and faster are we spinning it, and firmer and firmer shall we set it to regularity of revolution.  That means life!”

—­Shrapnel roars:  you will have Nevil in a minute.