dance on the morning. As for their chagrin at noon, you will find
descriptions of it in the poet's Inferno. They are for lifting our clay
soil on a lever of Archimedes, and are not great mathematicians. They
have perchance a foot of our earth, and perpetually do they seem to be
producing an effect, perpetually does the whole land roll back on them.
You have not surely to be reminded that it hurts them; the weight is
immense. Dr. Shrapnel, however, speedily looked out again on his vast
horizon, though prostrate. He regained his height of stature with no
man's help. Success was but postponed for a generation or two. Is it so
very distant? Gaze on it with the eye of our parent orb! 'I shall not
see it here; you may,' he said to Jenny Denham; and he fortified his
outlook by saying to Mr. Lydiard that the Tories of our time walked, or
rather stuck, in the track of the Radicals of a generation back. Note,
then, that Radicals, always marching to the triumph, never taste it; and
for Tories it is Dead Sea fruit, ashes in their mouths! Those Liberals,
those temporisers, compromisers, a concourse of atoms! glorify
themselves in the animal satisfaction of sucking the juice of the fruit,
for which they pay with their souls. They have no true cohesion, for
they have no vital principle.

Mr. Lydiard being a Liberal, bade the doctor not to forget the work of
the Liberals, who touched on Tory and Radical with a pretty steady swing,
from side to side, in the manner of the pendulum of a clock, which is the
clock's life, remember that. The Liberals are the professors of the
practicable in politics.

'A suitable image for time-servers!' Dr. Shrapnel exclaimed, intolerant
of any mention of the Liberals as a party, especially in the hour of
Radical discomfiture, when the fact that compromisers should exist
exasperates men of a principle. 'Your Liberals are the band of Pyrrhus,