leman "to emancipate the borough
from the unconstitutional domination of an oligarchical faction, not
with a view to his own political aggrandizement,--indeed at great
personal inconvenience,--but actuated solely by abhorrence to tyranny,
and patriotic passion for the purity of election."

This announcement was followed, within two hours, by the arrival of
Captain Dashmore himself, in a carriage and four, covered with yellow
favours, and filled, inside and out, with harumscarum-looking friends,
who had come down with him to share the canvass and partake the fun.

Captain Dashmore was a thorough sailor, who had, however, conceived a
disgust to the profession from the date in which a minister's nephew had
been appointed to the command of a ship to which the captain considered
himself unquestionably entitled. It is just to the minister to add that
Captain Dashmore had shown as little regard for orders from a distance
as had immortalized Nelson himself; but then the disobedience had not
achieved the same redeeming success as that of Nelson, and Captain
Dashmore ought to have thought himself fortunate in escaping a severer
treatment than the loss of promotion. But no man knows when he is
well off; and retiring on half pay, just as he came into unexpected
possession of some forty or fifty thousand pounds, bequeathed by a
distant relation, Captain Dashmore was seized with a vindictive
desire to enter parliament, and inflict oratorical chastisement on the
Administration.

A very few hours sufficed to show the sea-captain to be a most capital
electioneerer for a popular but not enlightened constituency. It is true
that he talked the saddest nonsense ever heard from an open window; but
then his jokes were so broad, his manner so hearty, his voice so big,
that in those dark days, before the schoolmaster was abroad, he would
have beaten your philosophical Radical and moralizing Democrat hollow.
Moreover, he kissed all the women, old and young, with the zest of a
sailor who has known what it is to be three years at sea without
sight of a beardless lip; he threw open all the public-houses, asked a
numerous committee every day to dinner, and, chucking his purse up in
the air, declared "he would stick to his guns while there was a shot in
the locker." Till then, there had been but little political difference
between the candidate supported by Lord Lansmere's interest and the
opposing parties; for country gentlemen, in those days, wer