 reform short of that, it is like asking for a bit of an
avalanche which has already begun to thunder.«
    »That is fine, Ladislaw: that is the way to put it. Write that down, now. We
must begin to get documents about the feeling of the country, as well as the
machine-breaking and general distress.«
    »As to documents,« said Will, »a two-inch card will hold plenty. A few rows
of figures are enough to deduce misery from, and a few more will show the rate
at which the political determination of the people is growing.«
    »Good: draw that out a little more at length, Ladislaw. That is an idea,
now: write it out in the Pioneer. Put the figures and deduce the misery, you
know; and put the other figures and deduce - and so on. You have a way of
putting things. Burke, now: - when I think of Burke, I can't help wishing
somebody had a pocket-borough to give you, Ladislaw. You'd never get elected,
you know. And we shall always want talent in the House: reform as we will, we
shall always want talent. That avalanche and the thunder, now, was really a
little like Burke. I want that sort of thing - not ideas, you know, but a way of
putting them.«
    »Pocket-boroughs would be a fine thing,« said Ladislaw, »if they were always
in the right pocket, and there were always a Burke at hand.«
    Will was not displeased with that complimentary comparison, even from Mr.
Brooke; for it is a little too trying to human flesh to be conscious of
expressing one's self better than others and never to have it noticed, and in
the general dearth of admiration for the right thing, even a chance bray of
applause falling exactly in time is rather fortifying. Will felt that his
literary refinements were usually beyond the limits of Middlemarch perception;
nevertheless, he was beginning thoroughly to like the work of which when he
began he had said to himself rather languidly, »Why not?« - and he studied the
political situation with as ardent an interest as he had ever given to poetic
metres or mediævalism. It is undeniable that but for the desire to be where
Dorothea was, and perhaps the want of knowing what else to do, Will would not at
this time have been meditating on the needs of the English people or criticising
English statesmanship: he would probably have been rambling in Italy sketching
