he was of singularly cool sagacity, hard
on the downright, open to the humours of the distinct discrimination of
things in their roughness, the knowledge of the firmly-based materialism
of his nature caused him thoroughly to trust to his voice when he
delivered it in ardour--circumstance coming to be of daily recurrence.
Great love creates forethoughtfulness, without which incessant journalism
is a gabble. He was sure of his love, but who gave ear to his prescience?
Few: the echo of the country now and then, the Government not often. And,
dear me! those jog-trot sermonisers, mere commentators upon events,
manage somehow to keep up the sale of their journals: advertisements do
not flow and ebb with them as under the influence of a capricious moon.
Ah, what a public! Serve it honourably, you are in peril of collapsing:
show it nothing but the likeness of its dull animal face, you are
steadily inflated. These reflections within us! Might not one almost say
that the retreat for the prophet is the wilderness, far from the hustled
editor's desk; and annual should be the uplifting of his voice instead of
diurnal, if only to spare his blood the distemper? A fund of gout was in
Rockney's, and he had begun to churn it. Between gouty blood and luminous
brain the strife had set in which does not conduce to unwavering sobriety
of mind, though ideas remain closely consecutive and the utterance
resonant.

Never had he been an adulator of Bull. His defects as well as his
advantages as a politician preserved to him this virtue. Insisting on a
future, he could not do homage to the belying simulacrum of the present.
In the season of prosperity Rockney lashed the old fellow with the crisis
he was breeding for us; and when prostration ensued no English tongue was
loftier in preaching dignity and the means of recovery. Our monumental
image of the Misuse of Peace he pointed out unceasingly as at a despot
constructed by freemen out of the meanest in their natures to mock the
gift of liberty. His articles of foregone years were an extraordinary
record of events or conditions foreseen: seductive in the review of them
by a writer who has to be still foreseeing: nevertheless, that none of
them were bardic of Bull, and that our sound man would have acted wisely
in heeding some of the prescriptions, constituted their essential merit,
consolatory to think of, though painful. The country has gone the wrong
road, but it may yet cross over to the right o