Shirley

familiar to every ear in the neighbourhood but his own. He believed political and religious differences alone separated him and Mr. Yorke; had he known how the case really stood, he would hardly have been induced by any persuasion to cross his former rival's threshold.
     
    Mr. Yorke did not resume his lecture of Robert Moore; the conversation ere long recommenced in a more general form, though still in a somewhat disputative tone. The unquiet state of the country, the various depredations lately committed on mill-property in the district, supplied abundant matter for disagreement; especially as each of the three gentlemen present differed more or less in his views on these subjects. Mr. Helstone thought the masters aggrieved, the workpeople unreasonable; he condemned sweepingly the wide-spread spirit of disaffection against constituted authorities, the growing indisposition to bear with patience evils he regarded as inevitable: the cures he prescribed were vigorous government interference, strict magisterial vigilance; when necessary, prompt military coercion.
    Mr. Yorke wished to know whether this interference, vigilance, and coercion would feed those who were hungry, give work to those who wanted work and whom no man would hire. He scouted the idea of inevitable evils; he said public patience was a camel, on whose back the last atom that could be borne had already been laid, and that resistance was now a duty: the wide-spread spirit of disaffection against constituted authorities, he regarded as the most promising sign of the times; the masters, he allowed, were truly aggrieved, but their main grievances had been heaped on them by a »corrupt, base, and bloody« government (these were Mr. Yorke's epithets). Madmen like Pitt, demons like Castlereagh, mischievous idiots like Perceval, were the tyrants, the curses of the country, the destroyers of her trade. It was their infatuated perseverance in an unjustifiable, a hopeless, a ruinous war, which had brought the nation to its present pass. It was their monstrously oppressive taxation, it was the infamous »Orders in Council« – the originators of which deserved impeachment and the scaffold, if ever public men did – that hung a mill-stone about England's neck.
    »But where was the use of talking?« he demanded – »What chance was there of reason being heard in a land that was king-ridden, priest-ridden, peer-ridden – where a lunatic was the nominal monarch, an unprincipled debauchee the real ruler; where such an insult to common sense as hereditary legislators was tolerated – where such a humbug as a bench of bishops – such an arrogant abuse as a pampered, persecuting established Church was endured and venerated – where a standing army was maintained, and a host of lazy parsons and their pauper families were kept on the fat of the land?«
    Mr. Helstone, rising up and putting on his shovel-hat, observed in reply, »That in the course of his life he had met with two or three instances where sentiments of this sort had been very bravely maintained so long as health, strength, and worldly prosperity had been the allies of him who professed them; but there came a time,« he said, »to all men, ›when the keepers of the house should tremble; when they should be afraid of that which is high, and fear should be in the way;‹ and that time was the test of the advocate of anarchy and rebellion, the enemy of religion and order. Ere now,« he affirmed, he had been called upon to read »those prayers our Church has provided for the sick, by the miserable dying-bed of one of her most rancorous foes; he had seen such a one stricken with remorse, solicitous to discover a place for repentance, and unable to find any, though he sought it carefully with tears. He must forewarn Mr. Yorke, that blasphemy against God and the king was a deadly sin, and that there was such a thing as ›judgment to come.‹«
    Mr. Yorke »believed fully that there was such a thing as judgment to come. If it were otherwise, it would be difficult to imagine how all the scoundrels who seemed triumphant in this world, who broke innocent hearts with impunity, abused unmerited privileges, were a scandal to honourable callings, took the bread out of the mouths of the poor, brow-beat the humble, and truckled meanly to the rich and proud – were to be properly paid off, in such coin as they had earned. But,« he added, »whenever he got low-spirited about such like goings-on, and their seeming