's
holiday out of England had incited Dr. Shrapnel to break a positive restriction
put upon him by Jenny Denham, and actively pursue the canvass and the harangue
in person; by which conduct, as Jenny had foreseen, many temperate electors were
alienated from Commander Beauchamp, though no doubt the Radicals were made
compact: for they may be the skirmishing faction - poor scattered fragments,
none of them sufficiently downright for the other; each outstripping each;
rudimentary emperors, elementary prophets, inspired physicians,
nostrum-devouring patients, whatsoever you will; and still here and there a man
shall arise to march them in close columns, if they can but trust him; in
perfect subordination, a model even for Tories while they keep shoulder to
shoulder. And to behold such a disciplined body is intoxicating to the eye of a
leader accustomed to count ahead upon vapourish abstractions, and therefore
predisposed to add a couple of noughts to every tangible figure in his grasp.
Thus will a realized fifty become five hundred or five thousand to him: the very
sense of number is instinct with multiplication in his mind; and those years far
on in advance, which he has been looking to with some fatigue to the optics,
will suddenly and rollickingly roll up to him at the shutting of his eyes in a
temporary fit of gratification. So, by looking and by not looking, he achieves
his phantom victory - embraces his cloud.
    Dr. Shrapnel conceived that the day was to be a Radical success; and he, a
citizen aged and exercised in reverses, so rounded by the habit of them indeed
as to tumble and recover himself on the wind of the blow that struck him, was,
it must be acknowledged, staggered and cast down when he saw Beauchamp drop,
knowing full well his regiment had polled to a man. Radicals poll early; they
would poll at cockcrow if they might; they dance on the morning. As for their
chagrin at noon, you will find descriptions of it in the poet's Inferno. They
are for lifting our clay soil on a lever of Archimedes, and are not great
mathematicians. They have perchance a foot of our earth, and perpetually do they
seem to be producing an effect, perpetually does the whole land roll back on
them. You have not surely to be reminded that it hurts them; the weight is
immense. Dr. Shrapnel, however, speedily looked out again on his vast horizon,
though prostrate. He regained his height of stature with no man's help. Success
was but postponed for a generation or two. Is it so very distant?