‘Look here, Nevil,’ Stukely Culbrett checked Beauchamp in season:  ’I beg to inquire what Dr. Shrapnel means by “the people.”  We have in our country the nobles and the squires, and after them, as I understand it, the people:  that’s to say, the middle-class and the working-class—­fat and lean.  I’m quite with Shrapnel when he lashes the fleshpots.  They want it, and they don’t get it from “their organ,” the Press.  I fancy you and I agree about their organ; the dismallest organ that ever ground a hackneyed set of songs and hymns to madden the thoroughfares.’

‘The Press of our country!’ interjected Colonel Halkett in moaning parenthesis.

’It’s the week-day Parson of the middle-class, colonel.  They have their thinking done for them as the Chinese have their dancing.  But, Nevil, your Dr. Shrapnel seems to treat the traders as identical with the aristocracy in opposition to his “people.”  The traders are the cursed middlemen, bad friends of the “people,” and infernally treacherous to the nobles till money hoists them.  It’s they who pull down the country.  They hold up the nobles to the hatred of the democracy, and the democracy to scare the nobles.  One’s when they want to swallow a privilege, and the other’s when they want to ring-fence their gains.  How is it Shrapnel doesn’t expose the trick?  He must see through it.  I like that letter of his.  People is one of your Radical big words that burst at a query.  He can’t mean Quince, and Bottom, and Starveling, Christopher Sly, Jack Cade, Caliban, and poor old Hodge?  No, no, Nevil.  Our clowns are the stupidest in Europe.  They can’t cook their meals.  They can’t spell; they can scarcely speak.  They haven’t a jig in their legs.  And I believe they’re losing their grin!  They’re nasty when their blood’s up.  Shakespeare’s Cade tells you what he thought of Radicalizing the people.  “And as for your mother, I ’ll make her a duke”; that ’s one of their songs.  The word people, in England, is a dyspeptic agitator’s dream when he falls nodding over the red chapter of French history.  Who won the great liberties for England?  My book says, the nobles.  And who made the great stand later?—­the squires.  What have the middlemen done but bid for the people they despise and fear, dishonour us abroad and make a hash of us at home?  Shrapnel sees that.  Only he has got the word people in his mouth.  The people of England, my dear fellow, want heading.  Since the traders obtained power we have been a country on all fours.  Of course Shrapnel sees it:  I say so.  But talk to him and teach him where to look for the rescue.’

Colonel Halkett said to Stukely:  ’If you have had a clear idea in what you have just spoken, my head’s no place for it!’

Stukely’s unusually lengthy observations had somewhat heated him, and he protested with earnestness:  ‘It was pure Tory, my dear colonel.’

But the habitually and professedly cynical should not deliver themselves at length:  for as soon as they miss their customary incision of speech they are apt to aim to recover it in loquacity, and thus it may be that the survey of their ideas becomes disordered.