“Ay, Chillingly Gordon is a coming man, and
has all the earnestness you find absent in party and
in yourself.”
“You call him earnest?”
“Thoroughly, in the pursuit of one object,—the
advancement of Chillingly Gordon. If he get into
the House of Commons, and succeed there, I hope he
will never become my leader; for if he thought Christianity
in the way of his promotion, he would bring in a bill
for its abolition.”
“In that case would he still be your leader?”
“My dear Kenelm, you don’t know what is
the spirit of party, and how easily it makes excuses
for any act of its leader. Of course, if Gordon
brought in a bill for the abolition of Christianity,
it would be on the plea that the abolition was good
for the Christians, and his followers would cheer
that enlightened sentiment.”
“Ah,” said Kenelm, with a sigh, “I
own myself the dullest of blockheads; for instead
of tempting me into the field of party politics, your
talk leaves me in stolid amaze that you do not take
to your heels, where honour can only be saved by flight.”
“Pooh! my dear Chillingly, we cannot run away
from the age in which we live: we must accept
its conditions and make the best of them; and if the
House of Commons be nothing else, it is a famous debating
society and a capital club. Think over it.
I must leave you now. I am going to see a picture
at the Exhibition which has been most truculently
criticised in ‘The Londoner,’ but which
I am assured, on good authority, is a work of remarkable
merit. I can’t bear to see a man snarled
and sneered down, no doubt by jealous rivals, who have
their influence in journals, so I shall judge of the
picture for myself. If it be really as good as
I am told, I shall talk about it to everybody I meet;
and in matters of art I fancy my word goes for something.
Study art, my dear Kenelm. No gentleman’s
education is complete if he does n’t know a
good picture from a bad one. After the Exhibition
I shall just have time for a canter round the Park
before the debate of the session, which begins to-night.”
With a light step the young man quitted the room,
humming an air from the “Figaro” as he
descended the stairs. From the window Kenelm
watched him swinging himself with careless grace into
his saddle and riding briskly down the street,—in
form and face and bearing a very model of young, high-born,
high-bred manhood. “The Venetians,”
muttered Kenelm, “decapitated Marino Faliero
for conspiring against his own order,—the
nobles. The Venetians loved their institutions,
and had faith in them. Is there such love and
such faith among the English?”
As he thus soliloquized he heard a shrilling sort
of squeak; and a showman stationed before his window
the stage on which Punch satirizes the laws and moralities
of the world, “kills the beadle and defies the
devil.”
KENELM turned from the sight of Punch and Punch’s
friend the cur, as his servant, entering, said a person
from the country, who would not give his name, asked
to see him.
