ppily the candidate knew little until after. There was a red band and
each musician received fifteen shillings a day, there happening
accidentally to be among them no fewer than ten patriotic red plumpers.
Large tea-parties attracted red ladies. The inns great and small were
thrown joyously open on one side or other, and when the time came, our
national heroes from Robin Hood to Lord Nelson and the Duke of
Wellington, as well as half the animal kingdom, the swan and salmon,
horses, bulls, boars, lions, and eagles, of all the colours of the
rainbow and in every kind of strange partnership, sent in bills for meat
and liquor supplied to free and independent electors to the tune of a
couple of thousand pounds. Apart from these black arts, and apart from
the duke's interest, there was a good force of the staunch and honest
type, the life-blood of electioneering and the salvation of party
government, who cried stoutly, 'I was born Red, I live Red, and I will
die Red.' 'We started on the canvass,' says one who was with Mr.
Gladstone, 'at eight in the morning and worked at it for about nine
hours, with a great crowd, band and flags, and innumerable glasses of
beer and wine all jumbled together; then a dinner of 30 or 40, with
speeches and songs until say ten o'clock; then he always played a rubber
of whist, and about twelve or one I got to bed and not to sleep.'

HUMOURS OF AN OLD ELECTION

At length the end came. At the nomination the show of hands was against
the reds, but when the poll was taken and closed on the second day,
Gladstone appeared at the head of it with 887 votes, against 798 for his
colleague Handley, and 726 for the fallen Wilde. 'Yesterday' (Dec. 13,
1832), he tells his father, 'we went to the town hall at 9 A.M., when
the mayor cast up the numbers and declared the poll. While he was doing
this the popular wrath vented itself for the most part upon Handley....
The sergeant obtained me a hearing, and I spoke for perhaps an hour or
more, but it was flat work, as they were no more than patient, and
agreed with but little that I said. The sergeant then spoke for an hour
and a half.... He went into matters connected with his own adieu to
Newark, besought the people most energetically to bear with their
disappointment like men, and expressed his farewell with great depth of
feeling. Affected to tears himself, he affected others also. In the
evening near fifty dined here [Clinton Arms] and the