Rightly or wrongly (there are differences of opinion about it) Mr. Beamish repressed the chthonic natural with a rod of iron beneath his rule.  The hoyden and the bumpkin had no peace until they had given public imitations of the lady and the gentleman; nor were the lady and the gentleman privileged to be what he called ‘free flags.’  He could be charitable to the passion, but he bellowed the very word itself (hauled up smoking from the brimstone lake) against them that pretended to be shamelessly guilty of the peccadilloes of gallantry.  His famous accost of a lady threatening to sink, and already performing like a vessel in that situation:  ’So, madam, I hear you are preparing to enrol yourself in the very ancient order?’ . . . (he named it) was a piece of insolence that involved him in some discord with the lady’s husband and ’the rascal steward,’ as he chose to term the third party in these affairs:  yet it is reputed to have saved the lady.

Furthermore, he attacked the vulgarity of persons of quality, and he has told a fashionable dame who was indulging herself in a marked sneer of disdain, not improving to her features, ’that he would be pleased to have her assurance it was her face she presented to mankind’:  a thing—­thanks perhaps to him chiefly—­no longer possible of utterance.  One of the sex asking him why he addressed his persecutions particularly to women:  ‘Because I fight your battles,’ says he, ’and I find you in the ranks of the enemy.’  He treated them as traitors.

He was nevertheless well supported by a sex that compensates for dislike of its friend before a certain age by a cordial recognition of him when it has touched the period.  A phalanx of great dames gave him the terrors of Olympus for all except the natively audacious, the truculent and the insufferably obtuse; and from the midst of them he launched decree and bolt to good effect:  not, of course, without receiving return missiles, and not without subsequent question whether the work of that man was beneficial to the country, who indeed tamed the bumpkin squire and his brood, but at the cost of their animal spirits and their gift of speech; viz. by making petrifactions of them.  In the surgical operation of tracheotomy, a successful treatment of the patient hangs, we believe, on the promptness and skill of the introduction of the artificial windpipe; and it may be that our unhappy countrymen when cut off from the source of their breath were not neatly handled; or else that there is a physical opposition in them to anything artificial, and it must be nature or nothing.  The dispute shall be left where it stands.