for the promoting or seconding of public opinion, that are as little to
be compared with the mighty metropolitan as are the fife and bugle boys
practising on their instruments round melancholy outskirts of garrison
towns with the regimental marching full band under the presidency of its
drum-major. No signature to the article was needed for Bevisham to know
who had returned to the town to pen it. Those long-stretching sentences,
comparable to the very ship Leviathan, spanning two Atlantic billows,
appertained to none but the renowned Mr. Timothy Turbot, of the Corn Law
campaigns, Reform agitations, and all manifestly popular movements
requiring the heaven-endowed man of speech, an interpreter of multitudes,
and a prompter. Like most men who have little to say, he was an orator
in print, but that was a poor medium for him--his body without his fire.
Mr. Timothy's place was the platform. A wise discernment, or else a
lucky accident (for he came hurriedly from the soil of his native isle,
needing occupation), set him on that side in politics which happened to
be making an established current and strong headway. Oratory will not
work against the stream, or on languid tides. Driblets of movements that
allowed the world to doubt whether they were so much movements as
illusions of the optics, did not suit his genius. Thus he was a Liberal,
no Radical, fountain. Liberalism had the attraction for the orator of
being the active force in politics, between two passive opposing bodies,
the aspect of either of which it can assume for a menace to the other,
Toryish as against Radicals; a trifle red in the eyes of the Tory. It
can seem to lean back on the Past; it can seem to be amorous of the
Future. It is actually the thing of the Present and its urgencies,
therefore popular, pouring forth the pure waters of moderation, strong in
their copiousness. Delicious and rapturous effects are to be produced in
the flood of a Liberal oration by a chance infusion of the fierier
spirit, a flavour of Radicalism. That is the thing to set an audience
bounding and quirking. Whereas if you commence by tilling a Triton