There was more of it.  Then the serious afflatus of the article condescended, as it were, to blow a shrill and well-known whistle:—­the study of the science of navigation made by Commander Beauchamp, R.N., was cited for a jocose warranty of a seaman’s aptness to assist in steering the Vessel of the State.  After thus heeling over, to tip a familiar wink to the multitude, the leader tone resumed its fit deportment.  Commander Beauchamp, in responding to the invitation of the great and united Liberal party of the borough of Bevisham, obeyed the inspirations of genius, the dictates of humanity, and what he rightly considered the paramount duty, as it is the proudest ambition, of the citizen of a free country.

But for an occasional drop and bump of the sailing gasbag upon catch-words of enthusiasm, which are the rhetoric of the merely windy, and a collapse on a poetic line, which too often signalizes the rhetorician’s emptiness of his wind, the article was eminent for flight, sweep, and dash, and sailed along far more grandly than ordinary provincial organs for the promoting or seconding of public opinion, that are as little to be compared with the mighty metropolitan as are the fife and bugle boys practising on their instruments round melancholy outskirts of garrison towns with the regimental marching full band under the presidency of its drum-major.  No signature to the article was needed for Bevisham to know who had returned to the town to pen it.  Those long-stretching sentences, comparable to the very ship Leviathan, spanning two Atlantic billows, appertained to none but the renowned Mr. Timothy Turbot, of the Corn Law campaigns, Reform agitations, and all manifestly popular movements requiring the heaven-endowed man of speech, an interpreter of multitudes, and a prompter.  Like most men who have little to say, he was an orator in print, but that was a poor medium for him—­his body without his fire.  Mr. Timothy’s place was the platform.  A wise discernment, or else a lucky accident (for he came hurriedly from the soil of his native isle, needing occupation), set him on that side in politics which happened to be making an established current and strong headway.  Oratory will not work against the stream, or on languid tides.  Driblets of movements that allowed the world to doubt whether they were so much movements as illusions of the optics, did not suit his genius.  Thus he was a Liberal, no Radical, fountain.  Liberalism had the attraction for the orator of being the active force in politics, between two passive opposing bodies, the aspect of either of which it can assume for a menace to the other, Toryish as against Radicals; a trifle red in the eyes of the Tory.  It can seem to lean back on the Past; it can seem to be amorous of the Future.  It is actually the thing of the Present and its urgencies, therefore popular, pouring forth the pure waters of moderation, strong in their copiousness.  Delicious and rapturous effects are to be produced in the flood of a Liberal oration