Beauchamp's Career. Volume 4

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George Meredith. Beauchamp's Career. Volume 4

CHAPTER XXVI. MR. BLACKBURN TUCKHAM

CHAPTER XXVII. A SHORT SIDELOOK AT THE ELECTION

CHAPTER XXVIII. TOUCHING A YOUNG LADY'S HEART AND HER INTELLECT

CHAPTER XXIX. THE EPISTLE OF DR. SHRAPNEL TO COMMANDER BEAUCHAMP

CHAPTER XXX. THE BAITING OF DR. SHRAPNEL

CHAPTER XXXI. SHOWING A CHIVALROUS GENTLEMAN SET IN MOTION

CHAPTER XXXII. AN EFFORT TO CONQUER CECILIA IN BEAUCHAMP'S FASHION

CHAPTER XXXIII. THE FIRST ENCOUNTER AT STEYNHAM

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Dr. Shrapnel conceived that the day was to be a Radical success; and he, a citizen aged and exercised in reverses, so rounded by the habit of them indeed as to tumble and recover himself on the wind of the blow that struck him, was, it must be acknowledged, staggered and cast down when he saw Beauchamp drop, knowing full well his regiment had polled to a man. Radicals poll early; they would poll at cockcrow if they might; they dance on the morning. As for their chagrin at noon, you will find descriptions of it in the poet's Inferno. They are for lifting our clay soil on a lever of Archimedes, and are not great mathematicians. They have perchance a foot of our earth, and perpetually do they seem to be producing an effect, perpetually does the whole land roll back on them. You have not surely to be reminded that it hurts them; the weight is immense. Dr. Shrapnel, however, speedily looked out again on his vast horizon, though prostrate. He regained his height of stature with no man's help. Success was but postponed for a generation or two. Is it so very distant? Gaze on it with the eye of our parent orb! 'I shall not see it here; you may,' he said to Jenny Denham; and he fortified his outlook by saying to Mr. Lydiard that the Tories of our time walked, or rather stuck, in the track of the Radicals of a generation back. Note, then, that Radicals, always marching to the triumph, never taste it; and for Tories it is Dead Sea fruit, ashes in their mouths! Those Liberals, those temporisers, compromisers, a concourse of atoms! glorify themselves in the animal satisfaction of sucking the juice of the fruit, for which they pay with their souls. They have no true cohesion, for they have no vital principle.

Mr. Lydiard being a Liberal, bade the doctor not to forget the work of the Liberals, who touched on Tory and Radical with a pretty steady swing, from side to side, in the manner of the pendulum of a clock, which is the clock's life, remember that. The Liberals are the professors of the practicable in politics.

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'If you care to read it to me. Did a single hieroglyphic figure stand for so much?'

'I have never deciphered one.'

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