be
useful besides as an interpreter, as she understood French very
tolerably, and had learned a good deal of Italian. There might be
advantage by and by from being able to advertise French and Italian
acquired off the Continent, for perhaps a school might suit the
Melvilles better than going into business; so Jane was very glad indeed
that her sister, who would profit most by it, should take the trip
rather than herself. Miss Phillips returned to Derbyshire, as she had
no desire to stay even with such a congenial companion as Miss
Melville, with the drawback of a houseful of children.

In the meantime Francis' canvass went on briskly; Mr. Sinclair
constituted himself his most active agent, and certainly took more
trouble and fatigue about it than any paid agent; but he sometimes
seemed to do his cause more harm than good by his constant recurrence
to first principles, which alarmed the jog-trot old Whigs, and
occasionally even the out-and-out Radicals.

The five burghs, whose representation Mr. Hogarth was about to contest,
were grouped together because they lay in adjoining counties, and not
because they had any identity of interests. In the good old times,
before the passing of the Reform Bill, each burgh sent one delegate to
vote for the member. The delegate was elected by the majority of the
town council, and as that body invariably elected their successors, the
representation of the citizens, either municipal or parliamentary, by
such means, was the most glorious fiction that has ever been devised by
the wisdom of our ancestors. The double election in this case had no
good tendency. The Reform Bill was, on the whole, a very good thing,
more because it was a great change in the representation, which was
carried out without endangering the constitution, and was an earnest of
still greater reforms being made in the future, than because there is
any very great improvement either in the character of the electors or
their representatives; but to Scotland it was a greater boon than to
England; for the semblance of representative institutions without the
reality was a mockery to a free people, and a very mischievous mockery.
In 185--the burghs had each their registered voters on the roll, who
each voted for his favourite candidate, so that the votes of five
hundred men in one burgh could not be neutralized by those of eighty
men in another.

The stronghold of the Conservative party lay in Swinton, the genteel,
and Free