ll a put-up job, for
he never afterwards showed the smallest symptom of lunacy. He had not
worked sufficiently, and knew he must fail. So he became temporarily
insane, to avoid defeat and maintain his reputation for scholarship.
He left Oxford without taking a degree, and owing money right and
left--to tradesmen, to his friends, to his tutor. Then he disappeared
for some years.

Next he suddenly cropped up again in Ireland. A small borough
constituency had been suddenly declared vacant. GORTON happened to be
staying in the hotel. He promptly offered himself as a candidate, and
plunged with extraordinary vigour into the contest. The way that man
fooled a simple-hearted Irish electorate was marvellous. They came to
believe him to be a millionnaire, a king of finance, a personage at
whose nod Statesmen trembled, a being who mingled with all that was
highest and best in the land. He cajoled them, he flattered them, he
talked them round his little finger, he rollicked with them, opened
golden vistas of promise to everyone of them, smiled at their wives,
defied the Lord Lieutenant, and was elected by a crushing majority
over a native pork-merchant who had nothing but his straightforward
honesty to commend him. Of course there was a petition, and equally
of course GORTON was unseated. Then came the reckoning. GORTON had
apparently intimated that two of the great London political Clubs were
so warmly interested in his candidature as to have undertaken to pay
all his expenses. But when application was made to these institutions,
their secretaries professed a complete and chilling ignorance of
GORTON, and the deputation from Ballywhacket, which had gone to London
in search of gold, had to return empty-handed to their native place,
after wasting a varied stock of full-flavoured Irish denunciation on
the London pavements. But GORTON was undaunted. He actually published
an address in which he lashed the hateful ingratitude of men
who betrayed their friends with golden words, and abandoned them
shamefully in the hour of defeat. But never, so he said, would he
abandon the betrayed electors of Ballywhacket. Others might shuffle,
and cheat and cozen, but he might be counted upon to remain firm,
faithful, and incorruptible amidst the seething waves of political
turpitude.

Having issued this, he vanished again, and was heard of no more for
six or seven years. Then he gradually began to emerge again. He was
engaged in the completion of