brimstone. Soaring is impossible among that faction; but
this they can do, they can furnish the Tory his opportunity to soar. When
hear you a thrilling Tory speech that carries the country with it, save
when the incendiary Radical has shrieked? If there was envy in the soul
of Timothy, it was addressed to the fine occasions offered to the Tory
speaker for vindicating our ancient principles and our sacred homes. He
admired the tone to be assumed for that purpose: it was a good note. Then
could the Tory, delivering at the right season the Shakesperian 'This
England . . .' and Byronic--'The inviolate Island . . .' shake the frame,
as though smiting it with the tail of the gymnotus electricus. Ah, and
then could he thump out his Horace, the Tory's mentor and his cordial,
with other great ancient comic and satiric poets, his old Port of the
classical cellarage, reflecting veneration upon him who did but name them
to an audience of good dispositions. The Tory possessed also an innate
inimitably easy style of humour, that had the long reach, the jolly
lordly indifference, the comfortable masterfulness, of the whip of a
four-in-hand driver, capable of flicking and stinging, and of being
ironically caressing. Timothy appreciated it, for he had winced under it.
No professor of Liberalism could venture on it, unless it were in the
remote district of a back parlour, in the society of a cherishing friend
or two, and with a slice of lemon requiring to be refloated in the glass.

But gifts of this description were of a minor order. Liberalism gave the
heading cry, devoid of which parties are dogs without a scent, orators
mere pump-handles. The Tory's cry was but a whistle to his pack, the
Radical howled to the moon like any chained hound. And no wonder, for
these parties had no established current, they were as hard-bound waters;
the Radical being dyked and dammed most soundly, the Tory resembling a
placid lake of the plains, fed by springs and no confluents. For such
good reasons, Mr. Timothy rejoiced in the happy circumstances which had
expelled him from the shores of his native isle to find a refuge and a
vocation in Manchester at a period when an orator happened to be in
request because dozens were wanted. That centre of convulsions and source
of streams possessed the statistical orator, the reasoning orator, and
the inspired; with others of quality; and yet it had need of an
ever-ready spontaneous imperturbable speaker, whose bubbl