“If the worst comes to the worst,” thinks his lordship, “if ‘Sennacherib’ breaks down, and Blanche Kettering fights shy, and the sons of Judah thunder at the door of the ungodly, and ‘the pot boils over,’ and the world says ‘it’s all up with Mount,’ have I not still got something to fall back upon? Shall not my very difficulties point the way to overcome them? and when I am driven into a corner, _won’t_ I come out and astonish them all? I’ve got it _in_ me--I know I have. And the reviewers--pshaw! I defy them! Let them but lay a finger on my ‘Medea,’ and I’ll give them such a roasting as they haven’t had since the days of the ‘Dunciad.’ Byron did it: why shouldn’t I? If I could only settle down--and I _could_ settle down if I was regularly cleaned out--I think I am man enough to succeed. Bring out a work that would shake the Ministry, and scatter the moderate party--then for Progress, Improvement, Enfranchisement, and the March with the Times (rogue’s march though it be), and Mount Helicon, at the head of an invincible phalanx, in the House, with unbounded popularity out of doors, an English peerage--fewer points to the coronet--a seat in the Cabinet--why not? But here we are at Tattersall’s;” and the future statesman is infernally in want of a few hundreds, so now for “good information, long odds, a safe man, and a shot at the favourite!” As he walked down the narrow passage out of Grosvenor Place, now bowing to a peer, now nodding to a trainer, now indulging in quaint _badinage_, which the vulgar call “chaff,” with a dog-stealer, who would have suspected the rattling, agreeable, off-hand Mount Helicon of deep-laid schemes and daring ambition? Nobody saw through him but old Barabbas, the Leg; and he once confided to a confederate on Newmarket Heath, “There’s not one of the young ones as knows his alphabet, ’cept the Lively Lord; and take my word for it, Plunder, he’s a deep ’un.”