their pens, that ever influenced public
opinion, touched the heart of nations, or guided the conscience of a
perplexed people. If they were ever heard of it was that they had been
pelted in a riot.

The exception which we have mentioned to their sorry careers was that
of the too adventurous prophet of the second Reformation; the _ductor
dubitantium_ appealed to by the Duchess of Bellamont, to convince her
son that the principles of religious truth, as well as of political
justice, required no further investigation; at least by young
marquesses.

The ready audacity with which this right reverend prelate had stood
sponsor for the second Reformation is a key to his character. He
combined a great talent for action with very limited powers of thought.

Bustling, energetic, versatile, gifted with an indomitable perseverance,
and stimulated by an ambition that knew no repose, with a capacity for
mastering details and an inordinate passion for affairs, he could
permit nothing to be done without his interference, and consequently
was perpetually involved in transactions which were either failures or
blunders. He was one of those leaders who are not guides. Having little
real knowledge, and not endowed with those high qualities of intellect
which permit their possessor to generalise the details afforded by study
and experience, and so deduce rules of conduct, his lordship, when he
received those frequent appeals which were the necessary consequence
of his officious life, became obscure, confused, contradictory,
inconsistent, illogical. The oracle was always dark.

Placed in a high post in an age of political analysis, the bustling
intermeddler was unable to supply society with a single solution.
Enunciating secondhand, with characteristic precipitation, some big
principle in vogue, as if he were a discoverer, he invariably shrank
from its subsequent application the moment that he found it might be
unpopular and inconvenient. All his quandaries terminated in the same
catastrophe; a compromise. Abstract principles with him ever ended
in concrete expediency. The aggregate of circumstances outweighed the
isolated cause. The primordial tenet, which had been advocated with
uncompromising arrogance, gently subsided into some second-rate measure
recommended with all the artifice of an impenetrable ambiguity.

Beginning with the second Reformation, which was a little rash but
dashing, the bishop, always ready, had in the course of hi