lp as our thoughts get
from the summer sky and the flower-fringed meadows.

Lydgate relied much on the psychological difference between what for
the sake of variety I will call goose and gander: especially on the
innate submissiveness of the goose as beautifully corresponding to the
strength of the gander.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

"Thrice happy she that is so well assured
Unto herself and settled so in heart
That neither will for better be allured
Ne fears to worse with any chance to start,
But like a steddy ship doth strongly part
The raging waves and keeps her course aright;
Ne aught for tempest doth from it depart,
Ne aught for fairer weather's false delight.
Such self-assurance need not fear the spight
Of grudging foes; ne favour seek of friends;
But in the stay of her own stedfast might
Neither to one herself nor other bends.
Most happy she that most assured doth rest,
But he most happy who such one loves best."
--SPENSER.

The doubt hinted by Mr. Vincy whether it were only the general election
or the end of the world that was coming on, now that George the Fourth
was dead, Parliament dissolved, Wellington and Peel generally
depreciated and the new King apologetic, was a feeble type of the
uncertainties in provincial opinion at that time. With the glow-worm
lights of country places, how could men see which were their own
thoughts in the confusion of a Tory Ministry passing Liberal measures,
of Tory nobles and electors being anxious to return Liberals rather
than friends of the recreant Ministers, and of outcries for remedies
which seemed to have a mysteriously remote bearing on private interest,
and were made suspicious by the advocacy of disagreeable neighbors?
Buyers of the Middlemarch newspapers found themselves in an anomalous
position: during the agitation on the Catholic Question many had given
up the "Pioneer"--which had a motto from Charles James Fox and was in
the van of progress--because it had taken Peel's side about the
Papists, and had thus blotted its Liberalism with a toleration of
Jesuitry and Baal; but they were ill-satisfied with the "Trumpet,"
which--since its blasts against Rome, and in the general flaccidity of
the public mind (nobody knowing who would support whom)--had become
feeble in its blowing.

It was a time, according to a noticeable article in the "Pioneer