Indeed, though we admit party to be the soundest method for conducting
us, party talk soon expends its attractiveness, as would a summer's
afternoon given up to the contemplation of an encounter of rams' heads.
Let us be quit of Mr. Grancey Lespel's lamentations. The Whig gentleman
had some reason to complain. He had been trained to expect no other
attack than that of his hereditary adversary-ram in front, and a sham
ram--no honest animal, but a ramming engine rather--had attacked him in
the rear. Like Mr. Everard Romfrey and other Whigs, he was profoundly
chagrined by popular ingratitude: 'not the same man,' his wife said of
him. It nipped him early. He took to proverbs; sure sign of the sere
leaf in a man's mind.

His wife reproached the people for their behaviour to him bitterly. The
lady regarded politics as a business that helped hunting-men a stage
above sportsmen, for numbers of the politicians she was acquainted with
were hunting-men, yet something more by virtue of the variety they could
introduce into a conversation ordinarily treating of sport and the
qualities of wines. Her husband seemed to have lost in that
Parliamentary seat the talisman which gave him notions distinguishing him
from country squires; he had sunk, and he no longer cared for the months
in London, nor for the speeches she read to him to re-awaken his mind and
make him look out of himself, as he had done when he was a younger man
and not a suspended Whig. Her own favourite reading was of love-
adventures written in the French tongue. She had once been in love, and
could be so sympathetic with that passion as to avow to Cecilia Halkett a
tenderness for Nevil Beauchamp, on account of his relations with the
Marquise de Rouaillout, and notwithstanding the demoniacal flame-halo of
the Radical encircling him.

The allusion to Beauchamp occurred a few hours after Cecilia's arrival at