Among the patriotic of stout English substance, who blew in the trumpet of the country, and were not bards of Bull to celebrate his firmness and vindicate his shiftings, Richard Rockney takes front rank.  A journalist altogether given up to his craft, considering the audience he had gained, he was a man of forethought besides being a trenchant writer, and he was profoundly, not less than eminently, the lover of Great Britain.  He had a manner of utterance quite in the tone of the familiar of the antechamber for proof of his knowing himself to be this person.  He did not so much write articles upon the health of his mistress as deliver Orphic sentences.  He was in one her physician, her spiritual director, her man-at-arms.  Public allusions to her were greeted with his emphatic assent in a measured pitch of the voice, or an instantaneous flourish of the rapier; and the flourish was no vain show.  He meant hard steel to defend the pill he had prescribed for her constitutional state, and the monition for her soul’s welfare.  Nor did he pretend to special privileges in assuming his militant stand, but simply that he had studied her case, was intimate with her resources, and loved her hotly, not to say inspiredly.  Love her as well, you had his cordial hand; as wisely, then all his weapons to back you.  There were occasions when distinguished officials and Parliamentary speakers received the impetus of Rockney’s approval and not hesitatingly he stepped behind them to bestow it.  The act, in whatever fashion it may have been esteemed by the objects propelled, was a sign of his willingness to let the shadow of any man adopting his course obscure him, and of the simplicity of his attachment.  If a bitter experience showed that frequently, indeed generally, they travelled scarce a tottering stagger farther than they were precipitated, the wretched consolation afforded by a side glance at a more enlightened passion, solitary in its depth, was Rockney’s.  Others perchance might equal his love, none the wisdom of it; actually none the vigilant circumspection, the shaping forethought.  That clear knowledge of the right thing for the country was grasped but by fits by others.  Enough to profit them this way and yonder as one best can!  You know the newspaper Press is a mighty engine.  Still he had no delight in shuffling a puppetry; he would have preferred automatic figures.  His calls for them resounded through the wilderness of the wooden.

Any solid conviction of a capable head of a certainty impressed upon the world, and thus his changes of view were not attributed to a fluctuating devotion; they passed out of the range of criticism upon inconsistency, notwithstanding that the commencement of his journalistic career smelt of sources entirely opposed to the conclusions upon which it broadened.  One secret of the belief in his love of his country was the readiness of Rockney’s pen to support our nobler patriotic impulses, his relish of the bluff besides.  His eye was on our commerce,