Had not Rockney been given to a high expression of opinion, plain in fervour, he would often have been exposed bare to hostile shafts.  Style cast her aegis over him.  He wore an armour in which he could walk, run and leap-a natural style.  The ardour of his temperament suffused the directness of his intelligence to produce it, and the two qualities made his weakness and strength.  Feeling the nerve of strength, the weakness was masked to him, while his opponents were equally insensible to the weakness under the force of his blows.  Thus there was nothing to teach him, or reveal him, except Time, whose trick is to turn corners of unanticipated sharpness, and leave the directly seeing and ardent to dash at walls.

How rigidly should the man of forethought govern himself, question himself! how constantly wrestle with himself!  And if he be a writer ebullient by the hour, how snappishly suspect himself, that he may feel in conscience worthy of a hearing and have perpetually a conscience in his charge!  For on what is his forethought founded?  Does he try the ring of it with our changed conditions?  Bus a man of forethought who has to be one of our geysers ebullient by the hour must live days of fever.  His apprehensions distemper his blood; the scrawl of them on the dark of the undeveloped dazzles his brain.  He sees in time little else; his very sincereness twists him awry.  Such a man has the stuff of the born journalist, and journalism is the food of the age.  Ask him, however, midway in his running, what he thinks of quick breathing:  he will answer that to be a shepherd on the downs is to be more a man.  As to the gobbling age, it really thinks better of him than he of it.

After a term of prolonged preachification he is compelled to lash that he may less despise the age.  He has to do it for his own sake.  O gobbling age! swallowing all, digesting nought, us too you have swallowed, O insensate mechanism! and we will let you know you have a stomach.  Furiously we disagree with you.  We are in you to lead you or work you pangs!

Rockney could not be a mild sermoniser commenting on events.  Rather no journalism at all for him!  He thought the office of the ordinary daily preacher cowlike.  His gadfly stung him to warn, dictate, prognosticate; he was the oracle and martyr of superior vision:  and as in affairs of business and the weighing of men he was of singularly cool sagacity, hard on the downright, open to the humours of the distinct discrimination of things in their roughness, the knowledge of the firmly-based materialism of his nature caused him thoroughly to trust to his voice when he delivered it in ardour—­circumstance coming to be of daily recurrence.  Great love creates forethoughtfulness, without which incessant journalism is a gabble.  He was sure of his love, but who gave ear to his prescience?  Few:  the echo of the country now and then, the Government not often.  And, dear me! those jog-trot sermonisers,