ations of genius, the dictates of humanity, and what he rightly
considered the paramount duty, as it is the proudest ambition, of the
citizen of a free country.

But for an occasional drop and bump of the sailing gasbag upon
catch-words of enthusiasm, which are the rhetoric of the merely
windy, and a collapse on a poetic line, which too often signalizes the
rhetorician's emptiness of his wind, the article was eminent for
flight, sweep, and dash, and sailed along far more grandly than ordinary
provincial organs for the promoting or seconding of public opinion, that
are as little to be compared with the mighty metropolitan as are the
fife and bugle boys practising on their instruments round melancholy
outskirts of garrison towns with the regimental marching full band under
the presidency of its drum-major. No signature to the article was needed
for Bevisham to know who had returned to the town to pen it. Those
long-stretching sentences, comparable to the very ship Leviathan,
spanning two Atlantic billows, appertained to none but the renowned Mr.
Timothy Turbot, of the Corn Law campaigns, Reform agitations, and all
manifestly popular movements requiring the heaven-endowed man of speech,
an interpreter of multitudes, and a prompter. Like most men who have
little to say, he was an orator in print, but that was a poor medium for
him--his body without his fire. Mr. Timothy's place was the platform. A
wise discernment, or else a lucky accident (for he came hurriedly from
the soil of his native isle, needing occupation), set him on that side
in politics which happened to be making an established current and
strong headway. Oratory will not work against the stream, or on languid
tides. Driblets of movements that allowed the world to doubt whether
they were so much movements as illusions of the optics, did not suit his
genius. Thus he was a Liberal, no Radical, fountain. Liberalism had the
attraction for the orator of being the active force in politics, between
two passive opposing bodies, the aspect of either of which it can assume
for a menace to the other, Toryish as against Radicals; a trifle red in
the eyes of the Tory. It can seem to lean back on the Past; it can seem
to be amorous of the Future. It is actually the thing of the Present
and its urgencies, therefore popular, pouring forth the pure waters of
moderation, strong in their copiousness. Delicious and rapturous
effects are to be produced in the flood of a Liberal orat