of letters for money,—he helped to distribute,
wherever he could, the chit-chat of
the hour, social, political, and miscellaneous.
He could swallow, upon occasion, without
even a momentary qualm of suspicion, those
delicate little gilded bon-bons of white-lies,
called canards, on the opposite side of the
channel. Yet, at the same time, he appears
to have had an instant relish and a very keen
appreciation of a pun or a witticism, or as he
preferred to express it, a bon-mot or a
calembourg. Particularly if, by good fortune,
the happy saying chanced to be in French—
a pasquinade from Le Cosaire, or a jest of
Talleyrand's. His mother-tongue, indeed, he
seems to have dropped, whenever he could
contrive to do so, upon every possible and
impossible opportunity. His fastidious taste
—we doubt not the least in the world—
would have been absolutely shocked by a
vulgarised translation into plain English of
such a frequent expression of his, let us say,
as "un peu fort." How he would have
shuddered—from his old-fashioned Bond Street
beaver down to the soles of his Hoby's—
if the familiar phrase had chanced, by some
miracle, to resolve itself on falling from his
lips into our own common vernacular, as
coming it a little too strong! No; the
Anglo-Saxon tongue was for him seemingly
too coarse and unmannerly. He flavoured
his style with a sprinkling of Gallic idioms,
and to those exotic blossoms of speech we
must attribute, of course, whatever that style
has (Heaven knows it is little enough!) of
piquancy. And so, for example, we find him
everlastingly "going to see," in French, those
perpetual nous verrons dropping from his
pen portentously as the nods of Lord
Burleigh. That he was undeniably—in spite of all
his exquisite grace à-la-mode—a Prig (as
already intimated), may be rendered
sufficiently apparent upon the instant, we
conceive, by a mere casual reference to his
sedate elaboration, preparatory to the
retailing of some wretched little joke. As,
for instance, where we read in this journal
of his, under the heading. Joke of Holmes
in the House of Commons, the following:
"When Mr. Morrison, the member for
Leicester, who, being a haberdasher, had
made himself conspicuous by a speech on the
foreign glove question, came up to him and
asked him if he could get him a pair for the
evening. [Italics sic in the original.] 'Of
what!' said Holmes, 'gloves or stockings?'"
Altogether, one of those appalling failures in
the way of a jest, when only the perpetrator
of the atrocity grins horribly a ghastly grin;
while the miserable victims of it—meaning the
mere listeners and lookers-on—are simply
overwhelmed with a painful depression of spirits,
as though they were being subjected to some
dead-lock or dread-agony, such as a stuttering
after-dinner speech. Yet Thomas Raikes,
Esquire, not only retails the joke upon
paper, in cold blood, to be posthumously
printed some quarter of a century afterwards,
but probably liked it! It is precisely in the
same marvellously innocent way that we
find him, five-and-twenty years ago talking
politics. Talking them; be it at once
observed, not the least that can be imagined
like a politician, but simply like what is
termed in English, a Busybody; in Latin, a
Quidnunc; and in French, a Gobemouche.
Besides this, he was the very embodiment—
and a rather substantial one, it should be
added—of the social phenomenon, popularly
known as an alarmist. But then, certainly,
it must be remembered, as some sort of
extenuation, that from the period at which this
fragment of the journal kept by Thomas
Raikes, Esquire, begins—namely, eighteen
hundred and thirty-one, dates the veritable
commencement of the decadence of Toryism.
Thomas Raikes, Esquire, merchant's son
though he is, being in truth a Tory, pur
sang—through and through—to the
backbone.

Naturally enough, everything looked
inauspicious then, even to the most staunchly
sanguine adherents of the grand, old, obdurate
cause of Toryism; a cause which might
perhaps have been not inaptly typified at
the period by a grimly visaged idol, bearing
an awful resemblance to Lord Eldon, squatting
eternally upon an ungainly altar-throne
shaped like the woolsack! Panic the most
dire was in the very midst of those upon
whom the cloak of Lord Eldon had floated
down, less, it seemed, as a robe of party,
than as a winding-sheet. Trades' unions
were "frighting the isle from its propriety,"
over the whole of the manufacturing
districts. Toryism Proper had not yet given
place to that colourless phantom of it
subsequently known as Conservatism. The
former was in the agonies of dissolution; the
latter was to be born of it by a sort of Cæsarian
operation, posthumously. Meanwhile
the tide was running up so strongly all
along the political coast-line, that poor
Mrs. Partington's broom was—not less
than the ruck on the Derby day—
nowhere.

According to the sombre view taken of
events by all the more orthodox believers in a
certain heaven-born minister deceased, the
national escutcheon had become so blotted
by disgraceful demands on the part of the
people, as well as by still more disgraceful
concessions on the part of the government,
that its entire field might be described as
sable, with, looming out of it, a fearful
heraldric apparition, never dreamed of before,
even by the dreamers of all the hideous
gryphons and other zoological hobgoblins
peopling the imaginative brains of
Rougedragon, or Clarencieux. A novel symbol—
only dimly definable as Radicalism rampant
—monopolising, it appeared to the distracted
Tories, at that most alarming crisis in our
history, the whole of the tarnished and