rrived,
when the repeal of the Corn Laws was carried by those very men whom
Mr. Thorne had hitherto regarded as the only possible saviours of
his country, he was for a time paralysed. His country was lost; but
that was comparatively a small thing. Other countries had flourished
and fallen, and the human race still went on improving under God's
providence. But now all trust in human faith must forever be at an
end. Not only must ruin come, but it must come through the apostasy
of those who had been regarded as the truest of true believers.
Politics in England, as a pursuit for gentlemen, must be at an end.
Had Mr. Thorne been trodden under foot by a Whig, he could have
borne it as a Tory and a martyr, but to be so utterly thrown over
and deceived by those he had so earnestly supported, so thoroughly
trusted, was more than he could endure and live. He therefore ceased
to live as a politician, and refused to hold any converse with the
world at large on the state of the country.

Such were Mr. Thorne's impressions for the first two or three years
after Sir Robert Peel's apostasy, but by degrees his temper, as did
that of others, cooled down. He began once more to move about, to
frequent the bench and the market, and to be seen at dinners shoulder
to shoulder with some of those who had so cruelly betrayed him. It
was a necessity for him to live, and that plan of his for avoiding
the world did not answer. He, however, and others around him who
still maintained the same staunch principles of protection--men like
himself who were too true to flinch at the cry of a mob--had their
own way of consoling themselves. They were, and felt themselves to
be, the only true depositaries left of certain Eleusinian mysteries,
of certain deep and wondrous services of worship by which alone the
gods could be rightly approached. To them and them only was it now
given to know these things and to perpetuate them, if that might
still be done, by the careful and secret education of their children.

We have read how private and peculiar forms of worship have been
carried on from age to age in families which, to the outer world,
have apparently adhered to the services of some ordinary church. And
so by degrees it was with Mr. Thorne. He learnt at length to listen
calmly while protection was talked of as a thing dead, although he
knew within himself that it was still quick with a mystic life. Nor
was he without a certain pleasure that such knowledge