hat
was the principal art of the Whigs.'

Thus did these gentlemen converse upon canvassing.

It is not possible to gather up in one volume of sound the rattle of the
knocks at Englishmen's castle-gates during election days; so, with the
thunder of it unheard, the majesty of the act of canvassing can be
but barely appreciable, and he, therefore, who would celebrate it must
follow the candidate obsequiously from door to door, where, like a
cross between a postman delivering a bill and a beggar craving an alms,
patiently he attempts the extraction of the vote, as little boys pick
periwinkles with a pin.

'This is your duty, which I most abjectly entreat you to do,' is pretty
nearly the form of the supplication.

How if, instead of the solicitation of the thousands by the unit, the
meritorious unit were besought by rushing thousands?--as a mound of the
plains that is circumvented by floods, and to which the waters cry, Be
thou our island. Let it be answered the questioner, with no discourteous
adjectives, Thou fool! To come to such heights of popular discrimination
and political ardour the people would have to be vivified to a pitch
little short of eruptive: it would be Boreas blowing AEtna inside
them; and we should have impulse at work in the country, and immense
importance attaching to a man's whether he will or he won't--enough to
womanize him. We should be all but having Parliament for a sample of our
choicest rather than our likest: and see you not a peril in that?

Conceive, for the fleeting instants permitted to such insufferable
flights of fancy, our picked men ruling! So despotic an oligarchy as
would be there, is not a happy subject of contemplation. It is not too
much to say that a domination of the Intellect in England would at once
and entirely alter the face of the country. We should be governed by the
head with a vengeance: all the rest of the country being base members
indeed; Spartans--helots. Criticism, now so helpful to us, would wither
to the root: fun would die out of Parliament, and outside of it:
we could never laugh at our masters, or command them: and that good
old-fashioned shouldering of separate interests, which, if it stops
progress, like a block in the pit entrance to a theatre, proves us equal
before the law, puts an end to the pretence of higher merit in the one
or the other, and renders a stout build the safest assurance for coming
through ultimately, would be transformed to a painful