“Pardon, colonel; I forgot to roar, but old Nevil marks all down that page for encomium,” said Captain Baskelett. “Oh! here we are. English loyalty is the subject. Now, pray attend to this, colonel. Shrapnel communicates to Beauchamp that if ten Beauchamps were spouting over the country without intermission he might condescend to hope. So on—to British loyalty. We are, so long as our sovereigns are well-conducted persons, and we cannot unseat them—observe; he is eminently explicit, the old traitor!—we are to submit to the outward forms of respect, but we are frankly to say we are Republicans; he has the impudence to swear that England is a Republican country, and calls our thoroughgoing loyalty—yours and mine, colonel—disloyalty. Hark: ‘Where kings lead, it is to be supposed they are wanted. Service is the noble office on earth, and where kings do service let them take the first honours of the State: but’—hark at this—‘the English middle-class, which has absorbed the upper, and despises, when it is not quaking before it, the lower, will have nothing above it but a ricketty ornament like that you see on a confectioner’s twelfth-cake.’” “The man deserves hanging!” said Colonel Halkett. “Further, my dear colonel, and Nevil marks it pretty much throughout: ‘This loyalty smacks of a terrible perfidy. Pass the lords and squires; they are old trees, old foundations, or joined to them, whether old or new; they naturally apprehend dislocation when a wind blows, a river rises, or a man speaks;—that comes of age or aping age: their hearts are in their holdings! For the loyalty of the rest of the land, it is the shopkeeper’s loyalty, which is to be computed by the exact annual sum of his net profits. It is now at high tide. It will last with the prosperity of our commerce.’—The insolent old vagabond!—‘Let commercial disasters come on us, and what of the loyalty now paying its hundreds of thousands, and howling down questioners! In a day of bankruptcies, how much would you bid for the loyalty of a class shivering under deprivation of luxuries, with its God Comfort beggared? Ay, my Beauchamp,’—the most offensive thing to me is that ‘my Beauchamp,’ but old Nevil has evidently given himself up hand and foot to this ruffian—‘ay, when you reflect that fear of the so-called rabble, i.e. the people, the unmoneyed class, which knows not Comfort, tastes not of luxuries, is the main component of their noisy frigid loyalty, and that the people are not with them but against, and yet that the people might be won by visible forthright kingly service to a loyalty outdoing theirs as the sun the moon; ay, that the people verily thirst to love and reverence; and _that their love is the only love worth having_, because it is disinterested love, and endures, and takes heat in adversity,—reflect on it and wonder at the inversion of things! So with a Church. It lives if it is at home with the poor. In the arms of