_Mr. Sarcastic._ Or, as Heraclitus the Ephesian proposed to his countrymen, that all above the age of fourteen should hang themselves, before he would consent to give laws to the remainder. CHAPTER XXII THE BOROUGH OF ONEVOTE The day of election arrived. Mr. Sarcastic’s rumoured preparations, and the excellence of the ale which he had broached in the city of Novote, had given a degree of _éclat_ to the election for the borough of Onevote, which it had never before possessed; the representatives usually sliding into their nomination with the same silence and decorum with which a solitary spinster slides into her pew at Wednesday’s or Friday’s prayers in a country church. The resemblance holds good also in this respect, that, as the curate addresses the solitary maiden with the appellation of _dearly beloved brethren_, so the representatives always pluralised their solitary elector, by conferring on him the appellation of _a respectable body of constituents_. Mr. Sarcastic, however, being determined to amuse himself at the expense of this most ‘venerable _feature_’ in our old constitution, as Lord C. calls a rotten borough, had brought Mr. Christopher Corporate into his views by the adhibition of _persuasion in a tangible shape_. It was generally known in Novote that something would be going forward at Onevote, though nobody could tell precisely what, except that a long train of brewer’s drays had left the city for the borough, in grand procession, on the preceding day, under the escort of a sworn band of special constables, who were to keep guard over the ale all night. This detachment was soon followed by another, under a similar escort, and with similar injunctions; and it was understood that this second expedition of _frothy rhetoric_ was sent forth under the auspices of Sir Oran Haut-ton, Baronet, the brother candidate of Simon Sarcastic, Esquire, for the representation of the ancient and honourable borough. The borough of Onevote stood in the middle of a heath, and consisted of a solitary farm, of which the land was so poor and untractable, that it would not have been worth the while of any human being to cultivate it, had not the Duke of Rottenburgh found it very well worth his to pay his tenant for living there, to keep the honourable borough in existence.