eathing: he will
answer that to be a shepherd on the downs is to be more a man. As to the
gobbling age, it really thinks better of him than he of it.

After a term of prolonged preachification he is compelled to lash
that he may less despise the age. He has to do it for his own sake.
O gobbling age! swallowing all, digesting nought, us too you have
swallowed, O insensate mechanism! and we will let you know you have a
stomach. Furiously we disagree with you. We are in you to lead you or
work you pangs!

Rockney could not be a mild sermoniser commenting on events. Rather no
journalism at all for him! He thought the office of the ordinary daily
preacher cowlike. His gadfly stung him to warn, dictate, prognosticate;
he was the oracle and martyr of superior vision: and as in affairs of
business and the weighing of men he was of singularly cool
sagacity, hard on the downright, open to the humours of the distinct
discrimination of things in their roughness, the knowledge of the
firmly-based materialism of his nature caused him thoroughly to trust to
his voice when he delivered it in ardour--circumstance coming to be of
daily recurrence. Great love creates forethoughtfulness, without which
incessant journalism is a gabble. He was sure of his love, but who gave
ear to his prescience? Few: the echo of the country now and then, the
Government not often. And, dear me! those jog-trot sermonisers, mere
commentators upon events, manage somehow to keep up the sale of their
journals: advertisements do not flow and ebb with them as under the
influence of a capricious moon. Ah, what a public! Serve it honourably,
you are in peril of collapsing: show it nothing but the likeness of its
dull animal face, you are steadily inflated. These reflections within
us! Might not one almost say that the retreat for the prophet is the
wilderness, far from the hustled editor's desk; and annual should be the
uplifting of his voice instead of diurnal, if only to spare his blood
the distemper? A fund of gout was in Rockney's, and he had begun to
churn it. Between gouty blood and luminous brain the strife had set
in which does not conduce to unwavering sobriety of mind, though ideas
remain closely consecutive and the utterance resonant.

Never had he been an adulator of Bull. His defects as well as his
advantages as a politician preserved to him this virtue. Insisting on a
future, he could not do homage to the belying simulacrum of the present.
In the sea