g the audience he had
gained, he was a man of forethought besides being a trenchant writer,
and he was profoundly, not less than eminently, the lover of Great
Britain. He had a manner of utterance quite in the tone of the familiar
of the antechamber for proof of his knowing himself to be this person.
He did not so much write articles upon the health of his mistress as
deliver Orphic sentences. He was in one her physician, her spiritual
director, her man-at-arms. Public allusions to her were greeted with his
emphatic assent in a measured pitch of the voice, or an instantaneous
flourish of the rapier; and the flourish was no vain show. He meant hard
steel to defend the pill he had prescribed for her constitutional state,
and the monition for her soul's welfare. Nor did he pretend to special
privileges in assuming his militant stand, but simply that he had
studied her case, was intimate with her resources, and loved her hotly,
not to say inspiredly. Love her as well, you had his cordial hand; as
wisely, then all his weapons to back you. There were occasions when
distinguished officials and Parliamentary speakers received the impetus
of Rockney's approval and not hesitatingly he stepped behind them to
bestow it. The act, in whatever fashion it may have been esteemed by the
objects propelled, was a sign of his willingness to let the shadow of
any man adopting his course obscure him, and of the simplicity of
his attachment. If a bitter experience showed that frequently, indeed
generally, they travelled scarce a tottering stagger farther than they
were precipitated, the wretched consolation afforded by a side glance at
a more enlightened passion, solitary in its depth, was Rockney's. Others
perchance might equal his love, none the wisdom of it; actually none the
vigilant circumspection, the shaping forethought. That clear knowledge
of the right thing for the country was grasped but by fits by others.
Enough to profit them this way and yonder as one best can! You know the
newspaper Press is a mighty engine. Still he had no delight in shuffling
a puppetry; he would have preferred automatic figures. His calls for
them resounded through the wilderness of the wooden.

Any solid conviction of a capable head of a certainty impressed upon the
world, and thus his changes of view were not attributed to a fluctuating
devotion; they passed out of the range of criticism upon inconsistency,
notwithstanding that the commencement of his journa