by a chance infusion of the fierier spirit, a flavour of Radicalism.  That is the thing to set an audience bounding and quirking.  Whereas if you commence by tilling a Triton pitcher full of the neat liquor upon them, ’you have to resort to the natural element for the orator’s art of variation, you are diluted—­and that’s bathos, to quote Mr. Timothy.  It was a fine piece of discernment in him.  Let Liberalism be your feast, Radicalism your spice.  And now and then, off and on, for a change, for diversion, for a new emotion, just for half an hour or so-now and then the Sunday coat of Toryism will give you an air.  You have only to complain of the fit, to release your shoulders in a trice.  Mr. Timothy felt for his art as poets do for theirs, and considered what was best adapted to speaking, purely to speaking.  Upon no creature did he look with such contempt as upon Dr. Shrapnel, whose loose disjunct audiences he was conscious he could, giving the doctor any start he liked, whirl away from him and have compact, enchained, at his first flourish; yea, though they were composed of ‘the poor man,’ with a stomach for the political distillery fit to drain relishingly every private bogside or mountain-side tap in old Ireland in its best days—­the illicit, you understand.

Further, to quote Mr. Timothy’s points of view, the Radical orator has but two notes, and one is the drawling pathetic, and the other is the ultra-furious; and the effect of the former we liken to the English working man’s wife’s hob-set queasy brew of well-meant villany, that she calls by the innocent name of tea; and the latter is to be blown, asks to be blown, and never should be blown without at least seeming to be blown, with an accompaniment of a house on fire.  Sir, we must adapt ourselves to our times.  Perhaps a spark or two does lurk about our house, but we have vigilant watchmen in plenty, 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.