leader tone resumed its fit deportment. Commander
Beauchamp, in responding to the invitation of the great and united
Liberal party of the borough of Bevisham, obeyed the inspirations 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 urgencie