 on Reform.«
    »Let Brooke reform his rent-roll. He's a cursed old screw, and the buildings
all over his estate are going to rack. I suppose this young fellow is some loose
fish from London.«
    »His name is Ladislaw. He is said to be of foreign extraction.«
    »I know the sort,« said Mr. Hawley; »some emissary. He'll begin with
flourishing about the Rights of Man and end with murdering a wench. That's the
style.«
    »You must concede that there are abuses, Hawley,« said Mr. Hack-butt,
foreseeing some political disagreement with his family lawyer. »I myself should
never favour immoderate views - in fact I take my stand with Huskisson - but I
cannot blind myself to the consideration that the non-representation of large
towns --«
    »Large towns be damned!« said Mr. Hawley, impatient of exposition. »I know a
little too much about Middlemarch elections. Let 'em quash every pocket borough
to-morrow, and bring in every mushroom town in the kingdom - they'll only
increase the expense of getting into Parliament. I go upon facts.«
    Mr. Hawley's disgust at the notion of the Pioneer being edited by an
emissary, and of Brooke becoming actively political - as if a tortoise of
desultory pursuits should protrude its small head ambitiously and become rampant
- was hardly equal to the annoyance felt by some members of Mr. Brooke's own
family. The result had oozed forth gradually, like the discovery that your
neighbour has set up an unpleasant kind of manufacture which will be permanently
under your nostrils without legal remedy. The Pioneer had been secretly bought
even before Will Ladislaw's arrival, the expected opportunity having offered
itself in the readiness of the proprietor to part with a valuable property which
did not pay; and in the interval since Mr. Brooke had written his invitation,
those germinal ideas of making his mind tell upon the world at large which had
been present in him from his younger years, but had hitherto lain in some
obstruction, had been sprouting under cover.
    The development was much furthered by a delight in his guest which proved
greater even than he had anticipated. For it seemed that Will was not only at
home in all those artistic and literary subjects which Mr. Brooke had gone into
at one time, but that he was strikingly ready at seizing the points of the
political situation, and dealing with them in that large spirit which, aided by
adequate memory, lends itself to quotation and general effectiveness
