? But whether the ingenuity comes of native sagacity, as it is
averred by some, or whether it shows an instinct labouring to supply the
deficiencies of stupidity, according to others, I cannot express an opinion. I
give you the position of the country undisturbed by any moralizings of mine. The
youth I introduce to you will rarely let us escape from it; for the reason that
he was born with so extreme and passionate a love for his country, that he
thought all things else of mean importance in comparison: and our union is one
in which, following the counsel of a sage and seer, I must try to paint for you
what is, not that which I imagine. This day, this hour, this life, and even
politics, the centre and throbbing heart of it (enough, when unburlesqued, to
blow the down off the gossamer-stump of fiction at a single breath, I have heard
tell), must be treated of: men, and the ideas of men, which are - it is policy
to be emphatic upon truisms - are actually the motives of men in a greater
degree than their appetites: these are my theme; and may it be my fortune to
keep them at blood-heat, and myself calm as a statue of Memnon in prostrate
Egypt! He sits there waiting for the sunlight; I here, and readier to be musical
than you think. I can at any rate be impartial; and do but fix your eyes on the
sunlight striking him and swallowing the day in rounding him, and you have an
image of the passive receptivity of shine and shade I hold it good to aim at, if
at the same time I may keep my characters at blood-heat. I shoot my arrows at a
mark that is pretty certain to return them to me. And as to perfect success, I
should be like the panic-stricken shopkeepers in my alarm at it; for I should
believe that genii of the air fly above our tree-tops between us and the
incognizable spheres, catching those ambitious shafts they deem it a promise of
fun to play pranks with.
 
Young Mr. Beauchamp at that period of the panic had not the slightest feeling
for the taxpayer. He was therefore unable to penetrate the mystery of our
roundabout way of enlivening him. He pored over the journals in perplexity, and
talked of his indignation nightly to his pretty partners at balls, who knew not
they were lesser Andromedas of his dear Andromeda country, but danced and
chatted and were gay, and said they were sure he would defend them. The men he
