bleeding is very ingenious? But whether the ingenuity comes of native
sagacity, as it is averred by some, or whether it shows an instinct
labouring to supply the deficiencies of stupidity, according to others,
I cannot express an opinion. I give you the position of the country
undisturbed by any moralizings of mine. The youth I introduce to you
will rarely let us escape from it; for the reason that he was born with
so extreme and passionate a love for his country, that he thought all
things else of mean importance in comparison: and our union is one in
which, following the counsel of a sage and seer, I must try to paint for
you what is, not that which I imagine. This day, this hour, this life,
and even politics, the centre and throbbing heart of it (enough, when
unburlesqued, to blow the down off the gossamer-stump of fiction at a
single breath, I have heard tell), must be treated of men, and the ideas
of men, which are--it is policy to be emphatic upon truisms--are actually
the motives of men in a greater degree than their appetites: these are my
theme; and may it be my fortune to keep them at bloodheat, and myself
calm as a statue of Memnon in prostrate Egypt! He sits there waiting for
the sunlight; I here, and readier to be musical than you think. I can at
any rate be impartial; and do but fix your eyes on the sunlight striking
him and swallowing the day in rounding him, and you have an image of the
passive receptivity of shine and shade I hold it good to aim at, if at
the same time I may keep my characters at blood-heat. I shoot my arrows
at a mark that is pretty certain to return them to me. And as to perfect
success, I should be like the panic-stricken shopkeepers in my alarm at
it; for I should believe that genii of the air fly above our tree-tops
between us and the incognizable spheres, catching those ambitious shafts
they deem it a promise of fun to play pranks with.

Young Mr. Beauchamp at that period of the panic had not the slightest
feeling for the taxpayer. He was therefore unable to penetrate the