achieved the same redeeming success as that of Nelson, and Captain
Dashmore ought to have thought himself fortunate in escaping a severer
treatment than the loss of promotion. But no man knows when he is well
off; and retiring on half pay, just as he came into unexpected possession
of some forty or fifty thousand pounds, bequeathed by a distant relation,
Captain Dashmore was seized with a vindictive desire to enter parliament,
and inflict oratorical chastisement on the Administration.

A very few hours sufficed to show the sea-captain to be a most capital
electioneerer for a popular but not enlightened constituency. It is true
that he talked the saddest nonsense ever heard from an open window; but
then his jokes were so broad, his manner so hearty, his voice so big,
that in those dark days, before the schoolmaster was abroad, he would
have beaten your philosophical Radical and moralizing Democrat hollow.
Moreover, he kissed all the women, old and young, with the zest of a
sailor who has known what it is to be three years at sea without sight of
a beardless lip; he threw open all the public-houses, asked a numerous
committee every day to dinner, and, chucking his purse up in the air,
declared "he would stick to his guns while there was a shot in the
locker." Till then, there had been but little political difference
between the candidate supported by Lord Lansmere's interest and the
opposing parties; for country gentlemen, in those days, were pretty much
of the same way of thinking, and the question had been really local,--
namely, whether the Lansmere interest should or should not prevail over
that of the two squire-archical families who had alone, hitherto,
ventured to oppose it. But though Captain Dashmore was really a very
loyal man, and much too old a sailor to think that the State (which,
according to established metaphor, is a vessel par excellence) should
admit Jack upon quarterdeck, yet, what with talking against lords and
aristocracy, jobs and abuses, and searching through no very refined