plunge
into the nobler business of the world would be a haven of safety for a woman
with blood and imagination, when writing to Emma: »Mr. Redworth's great success
in Parliament is good in itself, whatever his views of present questions; and I
do not heed them when I look to what may be done by a man of such power in
striking at unjust laws, which keep the really numerically better-half of the
population in a state of slavery. If he had been a lawyer! It must be a lawyer's
initiative - a lawyer's Bill. Mr. Percy Dacier also spoke well, as might have
been expected, and his uncle's compliment to him was merited. Should you meet
him sound him. He has read for the Bar, and is younger than Mr. Redworth. The
very young men and the old are our hope. The middle-aged are hard and fast for
existing facts. We pick our leaders on the slopes, the incline and decline of
the mountain - not on the upper table-land midway, where all appears to men so
solid, so tolerably smooth, save for a few excrescences, roughnesses, gradually
to be levelled at their leisure; which induces one to protest that the
middle-age of men is their time of delusion. It is no paradox. They may be
publicly useful in a small way, I do not deny it at all. They must be near the
gates of life - the opening or the closing - for their minds to be accessible to
the urgency of the greater questions. Otherwise the world presents itself to
them under too settled an aspect - unless, of course, Vesuvian Revolution shakes
the land. And that touches only their nerves. I dream of some old Judge! There
is one - if having caught we could keep him. But I dread so tricksy a pilot. You
have guessed him - the ancient Puck! We have laughed all day over the paper
telling us of his worrying the Lords. Lady Esquart congratulates her husband in
being out of it. Puck bien ridé and bewigged might perhaps - except that at the
critical moment he would be sure to plead allegiance to Oberon. However, the
work will be performed by some one: I am prophetic: - when maidens are
grandmothers! - when your Tony is wearing a perpetual laugh in the unhusbanded
regions where there is no institution of the wedding-tie.«
    For the reason that she was not to participate in the result of the old
Judge's or young hero's happy championship of the cause of