Ah, and then could he thump out his Horace, the Tory’s mentor and his cordial, with other great ancient comic and satiric poets, his old Port of the classical cellarage, reflecting veneration upon him who did but name them to an audience of good dispositions.  The Tory possessed also an innate inimitably easy style of humour, that had the long reach, the jolly lordly indifference, the comfortable masterfulness, of the whip of a four-in-hand driver, capable of flicking and stinging, and of being ironically caressing.  Timothy appreciated it, for he had winced under it.  No professor of Liberalism could venture on it, unless it were in the remote district of a back parlour, in the society of a cherishing friend or two, and with a slice of lemon requiring to be refloated in the glass.

But gifts of this description were of a minor order.  Liberalism gave the heading cry, devoid of which parties are dogs without a scent, orators mere pump-handles.  The Tory’s cry was but a whistle to his pack, the Radical howled to the moon like any chained hound.  And no wonder, for these parties had no established current, they were as hard-bound waters; the Radical being dyked and dammed most soundly, the Tory resembling a placid lake of the plains, fed by springs and no confluents.  For such good reasons, Mr. Timothy rejoiced in the happy circumstances which had expelled him from the shores of his native isle to find a refuge and a vocation in Manchester at a period when an orator happened to be in request because dozens were wanted.  That centre of convulsions and source of streams possessed the statistical orator, the reasoning orator, and the inspired; with others of quality; and yet it had need of an ever-ready spontaneous imperturbable speaker, whose bubbling generalizations and ability to beat the drum humorous could swing halls of meeting from the grasp of an enemy, and then ascend on incalescent adjectives to the popular idea of the sublime.  He was the artistic orator of Corn Law Repeal—­the Manchester flood, before which time Whigs were, since which they have walked like spectral antediluvians, or floated as dead canine bodies that are sucked away on the ebb of tides and flung back on the flow, ignorant whether they be progressive or retrograde.  Timothy Turbot assisted in that vast effort.  It should have elevated him beyond the editorship of a country newspaper.  Why it did not do so his antagonists pretended to know, and his friends would smile to hear.  The report was that he worshipped the nymph Whisky.

Timothy’s article had plucked Beauchamp out of bed; Beauchamp’s card in return did the same for him.