by his want of appetite; for though he seemed
rather surprised at the consideration that Alfred the Great was a
Catholic, or that apart from the Ten Commandments any conception of
moral conduct had occurred to mankind, he was not stimulated to further
inquiries on these remote matters. Yet he aspired to what he regarded as
intellectual society, willingly entertained beneficed clergymen, and
bought the books he heard spoken of, arranging them carefully on the
shelves of what he called his library, and occasionally sitting alone in
the same room with them. But some minds seem well glazed by nature
against the admission of knowledge, and Spike's was one of them. It was
not, however, entirely so with regard to politics. He had had a strong
opinion about the Reform Bill, and saw clearly that the large trading
towns ought to send members. Portraits of the Reform heroes hung framed
and glazed in his library: he prided himself on being a Liberal. In this
last particular, as well as in not giving benefactions and not making
loans without interest, he showed unquestionable firmness. On the Repeal
of the Corn Laws, again, he was thoroughly convinced. His mind was
expansive towards foreign markets, and his imagination could see that
the people from whom we took corn might be able to take the cotton goods
which they had hitherto dispensed with. On his conduct in these
political concerns, his wife, otherwise influential as a woman who
belonged to a family with a title in it, and who had condescended in
marrying him, could gain no hold: she had to blush a little at what was
called her husband's "radicalism"--an epithet which was a very unfair
impeachment of Spike, who never went to the root of anything. But he
understood his own trading affairs, and in this way became a genuine,
constant political element. If he had been born a little later he could
have been accepted as an eligible member of Parliament, and if he had
belonged to a high family he might have done for a member of the
Government. Perhaps his indifference to "views" would have passed for
administrative judiciousness, and he would have been so generally silent
that he must often have been silent in the right place. But this is
empty speculation: there is no warrant for saying what Spike would have
been and known so as to have made a calculable political element, if he
had not been educated by having to manage his trade. A small mind
trained to useful occupation for the sati