e spiritual solace it may be supposed, unto Lydiard,
Turbot, Beauchamp, or whomsoever the man chancing to be near him,
and never did Sir Oracle wear so extraordinary a garb. The favourite
missiles of the day were flour-bags. Dr. Shrapnel's uncommon height, and
his outrageous long brown coat, would have been sufficient to attract
them, without the reputation he had for desiring to subvert everything
old English. The first discharges gave him the appearance of a thawing
snowman. Drenchings of water turned the flour to ribs of paste, and
in colour at least he looked legitimately the cook's own spitted hare,
escaped from her basting ladle, elongated on two legs. It ensued that
whenever he was caught sight of, as he walked unconcernedly about, the
young street-professors of the decorative arts were seized with a frenzy
to add their share to the whitening of him, until he might have been
taken for a miller that had gone bodily through his meal. The popular
cry proclaimed him a ghost, and he walked like one, impassive, blanched,
and silent amid the uproar of mobs of jolly ruffians, for each of whom
it was a point of honour to have a shy at old Shrapnel.

Clad in this preparation of pie-crust, he called from time to time at
Beauchamp's hotel, and renewed his monologue upon that Radical empire in
the future which was for ever in the future for the pioneers of men,
yet not the less their empire. 'Do we live in our bodies?' quoth he,
replying to his fiery interrogation: 'Ay, the Tories! the Liberals!'
They lived in their bodies. Not one syllable of personal consolation did
he vouchsafe to Beauchamp. He did not imagine it could be required by a
man who had bathed in the pure springs of Radicalism; and it should
be remarked that Beauchamp deceived him by imitating his air of happy
abstraction, or subordination of the faculties to a distant view,
comparable to a ship's crew in difficulties receiving the report of the
man at the masthead. Beauchamp deceived Miss Denham too, and himself,
by saying, as if he cherished the philosophy of defeat, besides the
resolution to fight on:

'It's only a skirmish lost, and that counts for nothing in a battle
without end: it must be incessant.'

'But does incessant battling keep the intellect clear?' was her
memorable answer.

He glanced at Lydiard, to indicate that it came of that gentleman's
influence upon her mind. It was impossible for him to think that women
thought. The idea of a pretty wo