He should have known his uncle Everard better.

In this respect he seemed to have no memory.  But who has much that has given up his brains for a lodging to a single idea?  It is at once a devouring dragon, and an intractable steamforce; it is a tyrant that has eaten up a senate, and a prophet with a message.  Inspired of solitariness and gigantic size, it claims divine origin.  The world can have no peace for it.

Cecilia had not pleased him; none had.  He did not bear in mind that the sight of Dr. Shrapnel sick and weak, which constantly reanimated his feelings of pity and of wrath, was not given to the others of whom he demanded a corresponding energy of just indignation and sympathy.  The sense that he was left unaided to the task of bending his tough uncle, combined with his appreciation of the righteousness of the task to embitter him and set him on a pedestal, from which he descended at every sign of an opportunity for striking, and to which he retired continually baffled and wrathful, in isolation.

Then ensued the dreadful division in his conception of his powers:  for he who alone saw the just and right thing to do, was incapable of compelling it to be done.  Lay on to his uncle as he would, that wrestler shook him off.  And here was one man whom he could not move!  How move a nation?

There came on him a thirst for the haranguing of crowds.  They agree with you or they disagree; exciting you to activity in either case.  They do not interpose cold Tory exclusiveness and inaccessibility.  You have them in the rough; you have nature in them, and all that is hopeful in nature.  You drive at, over, and through them, for their good; you plough them.  You sow them too.  Some of them perceive that it is for their good, and what if they be a minority?  Ghastly as a minority is in an Election, in a lifelong struggle it is refreshing and encouraging.  The young world and its triumph is with the minority.  Oh to be speaking!  Condemned to silence beside his uncle, Beauchamp chafed for a loosed tongue and an audience tossing like the well-whipped ocean, or open as the smooth sea-surface to the marks of the breeze.  Let them be hostile or amicable, he wanted an audience as hotly as the humped Richard a horse.

At Romfrey Castle he fell upon an audience that became transformed into a swarm of chatterers, advisers, and reprovers the instant his lips were parted.  The ladies of the family declared his pursuit of the Apology to be worse and vainer than his politics.  The gentlemen said the same, but they were not so outspoken to him personally, and indulged in asides, with quotations of some of his uncle Everard’s recent observations concerning him:  as for example, ’Politically he’s a mad harlequin jumping his tights and spangles when nobody asks him to jump; and in private life he’s a mad dentist poking his tongs at my sound tooth:’  a highly ludicrous image of the persistent fellow, and a reminder