of the bluff besides.  His eye was on our commerce, on our courts of Law, on our streets and alleys, our army and navy, our colonies, the vaster than the island England, and still he would be busy picking up needles and threads in the island.  Deeds of valour were noted by him, lapses of cowardice:  how one man stood against a host for law or humanity, how crowds looked on at the beating of a woman, how a good fight was maintained in some sly ring between two of equal brawn:  and manufacturers were warned of the consequences of their iniquities, Government was lashed for sleeping upon shaky ordinances, colonists were gibbeted for the maltreating of natives:  the ring and fervour of the notes on daily events told of Rockney’s hand upon the national heart—­with a faint, an enforced, reluctant indication of our not being the men we were.

But after all, the main secret was his art of writing round English, instead of laborious Latinised periods:  and the secret of the art was his meaning what he said.  It was the personal throb.  The fire of a mind was translucent in Press columns where our public had been accustomed to the rhetoric of primed scribes.  He did away with the Biscay billow of the leading article—­Bull’s favourite prose—­bardic construction of sentences that roll to the antithetical climax, whose foamy top is offered and gulped as equivalent to an idea.  Writing of such a kind as Rockney’s was new to a land where the political opinions of Joint Stock Companies had rattled Jovian thunders obedient to the nod of Bull.  Though not alone in working the change, he was the foremost.  And he was not devoid of style.  Fervidness is the core of style.  He was a tough opponent for his betters in education, struck forcibly, dexterously, was always alert for debate.  An encounter between Swift and Johnson, were it imaginable, would present us probably the most prodigious Gigantomachy in literary polemics.  It is not imaginable among comparative pygmies.  But Rockney’s combat with his fellow-politicians of the Press partook of the Swiftian against the Johnsonian in form.  He was a steam ram that drove straight at the bulky broadside of the enemy.

Premiers of parties might be Captains of the State for Rockney:  Rockney was the premier’s pilot, or woe to him.  Woe to the country as well, if Rockney’s directions for steering were unheeded.  He was a man of forethought, the lover of Great Britain:  he shouted his directions in the voice of the lover of his mistress, urged to rebuke, sometimes to command, the captain by the prophetic intimations of a holier alliance, a more illumined prescience.  Reefs here, shallows there, yonder a foul course:  this is the way for you!  The refusal of the captain to go this way caused Rockney sincerely to discredit the sobriety of his intellect.  It was a drunken captain.  Or how if a traitorous?  We point out the danger to him, and if he will run the country on to it, we proclaim him guilty either of inebriety or of treason—­the alternatives are named:  one or the other has him.  Simple unfitness can scarcely be conceived of a captain having our common senses and a warranted pilot at his elbow.