ommiserating admirers of the non-voting sex all round the
borough called the poor dear commander. Beauchamp's holiday out of
England had incited Dr. Shrapnel to break a positive restriction put upon
him by Jenny Denham, and actively 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
h