riddle of popularity, which irritated and
repelled as constantly as it attracted him, would have come nearer to an
instructive presentment of it, by listening to these plain fellows, than
he was in the line of equipages, at a later hour of the day. The remarks
of the comfortably cushioned and wheeled, though they be eulogistic
to extravagance, are vapourish when we court them for nourishment;
substantially, they are bones to the cynical. He heard enumerations
of Mr. Radnor's riches, eclipsing his own past compute. A merchant, a
holder of mines, Director of a mighty Bank, projector of running rails,
a princely millionaire, and determined to be popular--what was the aim
of the man? It is the curse of modern times, that we never can be sure
of our Parliamentary seat; not when we have it in our pockets! The
Romans have left us golden words with regard to the fickleness of the
populace; we have our Horace, our Juvenal, we have our Johnson; and in
this vaunted age of reason it is, that we surrender ourselves into the
hands of the populace! Panem et circenses! Mr. Caddis repeated it, after
his fathers; his fathers and he had not headed them out of that original
voracity. There they were, for moneyed legislators to bewail their
appetites. And it was an article of his legislation, to keep them there.

Pedestrian purchasers of tickets for the Charity Concert, rather openly,
in an envelope of humour, confessed to the bait of the Radnor bread with
bit of fun. Savoury rumours were sweeping across Wrensham. Mr. Radnor
had borrowed footmen of the principal houses about. Cartloads of
provisions had been seen to come. An immediate reward of a deed of
benevolence, is a thing sensibly heavenly; and the five-shilling tickets
were paid for as if for a packet on the counter. Unacquainted with Mr.
Radnor, although the reports of him struck a summons to their gastric
juices, resembling in its effect a clamorous cordiality, they were
chilled, on their steps along the halfrolled new gravel-roads to the
house, by seeing three tables of prodigious length, where very evidently
a feast had raged: one to plump the people--perhaps excessively courted
by great gentlemen of late; shopkeepers, the villagers, children. These
had been at it for two merry hours. They had risen. They were beef and
pudding on legs; in some quarters, beer amiably manifest, owing to the
flourishes of a military band. Boys, who had shaken room through their
magical young corpora