leave sucking the teats of compromise, yea, once put on the air of men who fight and die for a cause, they fly to pieces.  And whither the fragments?  Chiefly, my friend, into the Tory ranks.  Seriously so I say.  You between future and past are for the present—­but with the hunted look behind of all godless livers in the present.  You Liberals are Tories with foresight, Radicals without faith.  You start, in fear of Toryism, on an errand of Radicalism, and in fear of Radicalism to Toryism you draw back.  There is your pendulum-swing!’

Lectures to this effect were delivered by Dr. Shrapnel throughout the day, for his private spiritual solace it may be supposed, unto Lydiard, Turbot, Beauchamp, or whomsoever the man chancing to be near him, and never did Sir Oracle wear so extraordinary a garb.  The favourite missiles of the day were flour-bags.  Dr. Shrapnel’s uncommon height, and his outrageous long brown coat, would have been sufficient to attract them, without the reputation he had for desiring to subvert everything old English.  The first discharges gave him the appearance of a thawing snowman.  Drenchings of water turned the flour to ribs of paste, and in colour at least he looked legitimately the cook’s own spitted hare, escaped from her basting ladle, elongated on two legs.  It ensued that whenever he was caught sight of, as he walked unconcernedly about, the young street-professors of the decorative arts were seized with a frenzy to add their share to the whitening of him, until he might have been taken for a miller that had gone bodily through his meal.  The popular cry proclaimed him a ghost, and he walked like one, impassive, blanched, and silent amid the uproar of mobs of jolly ruffians, for each of whom it was a point of honour to have a shy at old Shrapnel.

Clad in this preparation of pie-crust, he called from time to time at Beauchamp’s hotel, and renewed his monologue upon that Radical empire in the future which was for ever in the future for the pioneers of men, yet not the less their empire.  ‘Do we live in our bodies?’ quoth he, replying to his fiery interrogation:  ‘Ay, the Tories! the Liberals!’ They lived in their bodies.  Not one syllable of personal consolation did he vouchsafe to Beauchamp.  He did not imagine it could be required by a man who had bathed in the pure springs of Radicalism; and it should be remarked that Beauchamp deceived him by imitating his air of happy abstraction, or subordination of the faculties to a distant view, comparable to a ship’s crew in difficulties receiving the report of the man at the masthead.  Beauchamp deceived Miss Denham too, and himself, by saying, as if he cherished the philosophy of defeat, besides the resolution to fight on: 

’It’s only a skirmish lost, and that counts for nothing in a battle without end:  it must be incessant.’

‘But does incessant battling keep the intellect clear?’ was her memorable answer.