the voters; he gave dinners at the inn of true Liberals, and ate of them
contentedly; he delivered speeches incessantly. The whole force of his.
serio-comic genius was alive in its element at Chippenden. From balls
and dinners, and a sharp contest to maintain his position in town, he was
down among us by the first morning train, bright as Apollo, and quite the
sun of the place, dazzling the independent electors and their wives, and
even me somewhat; amazing me, certainly. Dettermain, his lawyer, who had
never seen him in action, and supposed he would treat an election as he
did his Case, with fits and starts of energy, was not less astonished,
and tried to curb him.

'Mr. Dettermain, my dear sir, I apprehend it is the electoral maxim to
woo the widowed borough with the tear in its eye, and I shall do so
hotly, in a right masculine manner,' my father said. 'We have the
start; and if we beat the enemy by nothing else we will beat him by
constitution. We are the first in the field, and not to reap it is to
acknowledge oneself deficient in the very first instrument with which
grass was cut.'

Our difficulty all through the election was to contend with his humour.
The many triumphs it won for him, both in speech and in action, turned at
least the dialectics of the argument against us, and amusing, flattering,
or bewildering, contributed to silence and hold us passive. Political
convictions of his own, I think I may say with truth, he had none. He
would have been just as powerful, after his fashion, on the Tory side,
pleading for Mr. Normanton Hipperdon; more, perhaps: he would have been
more in earnest. His store of political axioms was Tory; but he did
remarkably well, and with no great difficulty, in confuting them to the
wives of voters, to the voters themselves, and at public assemblies. Our
adversary was redoubtable; a promising Opposition member, ousted from his