sperity: a fixed sunny islet, towards
which, in all his voyagings and overclouded roamings, he could look with
satisfaction, as to an ever-open port of refuge.

The elder Sterling, after many battles, had reached his field of
conquest in these years; and was to be regarded as a victorious man.
Wealth sufficient, increasing not diminishing, had rewarded his labors
in the _Times_, which were now in their full flower; he had influence
of a sort; went busily among busy public men; and enjoyed, in the
questionable form attached to journalism and anonymity, a social
consideration and position which were abundantly gratifying to him. A
singular figure of the epoch; and when you came to know him, which it
was easy to fail of doing if you had not eyes and candid insight, a
gallant, truly gifted, and manful figure, of his kind. We saw much of
him in this house; much of all his family; and had grown to love them
all right well,--him too, though that was the difficult part of the
feat. For in his Irish way he played the conjurer very much,--"three
hundred and sixty-five opinions in the year upon every subject," as a
wag once said. In fact his talk, ever ingenious, emphatic and spirited
in detail, was much defective in earnestness, at least in clear
earnestness, of purport and outcome; but went tumbling as if in mere
welters of explosive unreason; a volcano heaving under vague deluges of
scoriae, ashes and imponderous pumice-stones, you could not say in what
direction, nor well whether in any. Not till after good study did you
see the deep molten lava-flood, which simmered steadily enough, and
showed very well by and by whither it was bound. For I must say
of Edward Sterling, after all his daily explosive sophistries, and
fallacies of talk, he had a stubborn instinctive sense of what was
manful, strong and worthy; recognized, with quick feeling, the charlatan
under his solemnest wig; knew as clearly as any man a pusillanimous
tailor in buckram, an ass under the lion's skin, and did with his whole
heart despise the same.

The sudden changes of doctrine in the _Times_, which failed not to
excite loud censure and indignant amazement in those days, were first
intelligible to you when you came to interpret them as his changes.
These sudden whirls from east to west on his part, and total changes of
party and articulate opinion at a day's warning, lay in the nature of
the man, and could not be helped; products of his fiery impatience,
of