backs were turned on
the noisy lower world, your ears were deaf to it.
    Apply we now the knocker to the door of venerable Quotation, and call the
aged creature forth, that he, half choked by his eheu! -
 
»A sound between a sigh and bray,«
 
may pronounce the familiar but respectable words, the burial-service of a time
so happy!
    Mr. Grancey Lespel would still have been sitting for Bevisham (or politely
at this elective moment bowing to resume the seat) had not those Manchester
jugglers caught up his cry, appropriated his colours, displaced and impersonated
him, acting beneficent Whig on a scale approaching treason to the Constitution;
leaning on the people in earnest, instead of taking the popular shoulder for a
temporary lift, all in high party policy, for the clever manoeuvre, to oust the
Tory and sway the realm. See the consequences. For power, for no other
consideration, those manufacturing rascals have raised Radicalism from its
primæval mire - from its petty backslum bookseller's shop and public-house
back-parlour effluvia of oratory - to issue dictates in England, and we,
England, formerly the oak, are topsy-turvy, like onions, our heels in the air!
    The language of party is eloquent, and famous for being grand at
illustration; but it is equally well known that much of it gives us humble ideas
of the speaker, probably because of the naughty temper party is prone to; which,
while endowing it with vehemence, lessens the stout circumferential view that
should be taken, at least historically. Indeed, though we admit party to be the
soundest method for conducting us, party talk soon expends its attractiveness,
as would a summer's afternoon given up to the contemplation of an encounter of
rams' heads. Let us be quit of Mr. Grancey Lespel's lamentations. The Whig
gentleman had some reason to complain. He had been trained to expect no other
attack than that of his hereditary adversary-ram in front, and a sham ram - no
honest animal, but a ramming engine rather - had attacked him in the rear. Like
Mr. Everard Romfrey and other Whigs, he was profoundly chagrined by popular
ingratitude: »not the same man,« his wife said of him. It nipped him early. He
took to proverbs; sure sign of the sere leaf in a man's mind.
    His wife reproached the people for their behaviour to him bitterly. The lady
regarded politics as a business that helped hunting-men a stage above sportsmen,
for numbers of the politicians she was acquainted with