pursue the
canvass and the harangue in person; by which conduct, as Jenny had
foreseen, many temperate electors were alienated from Commander
Beauchamp, though no doubt the Radicals were made compact: for they
may be the skirmishing faction--poor scattered fragments, none of
them sufficiently downright for the other; each outstripping each;
rudimentary emperors, elementary prophets, inspired physicians,
nostrum-devouring patients, whatsoever you will; and still here and
there a man shall arise to march them in close columns, if they can but
trust him; in perfect subordination, a model even for Tories while they
keep shoulder to shoulder. And to behold such a disciplined body is
intoxicating to the eye of a leader accustomed to count ahead upon
vapourish abstractions, and therefore predisposed to add a couple of
noughts to every tangible figure in his grasp. Thus will a realized
fifty become five hundred or five thousand to him: the very sense of
number is instinct with multiplication in his mind; and those years far
on in advance, which he has been looking to with some fatigue to the
optics, will suddenly and rollickingly roll up to him at the shutting of
his eyes in a temporary fit of gratification. So, by looking and by not
looking, he achieves his phantom victory--embraces his cloud.

Dr. Shrapnel conceived that the day was to be a Radical success; and
he, a citizen aged and exercised in reverses, so rounded by the habit
of them indeed as to tumble and recover himself on the wind of the blow
that struck him, was, it must be acknowledged, staggered and cast down
when he saw Beauchamp drop, knowing full well his regiment had polled to
a man. Radicals poll early; they would poll at cockcrow if they might;
they 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,'