Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 0their own thoughts in the confusion of a Tory Ministry
passing Liberal measures, of Tory nobles and electors being
anxious to return Liberals rather than friends of the recre-
ant Ministers, and of outcries for remedies which seemed
to have a mysteriously remote bearing on private interest,
and were made suspicious by the advocacy of disagreeable
neighbors? Buyers of the Middlemarch newspapers found
themselves in an anomalous position: during the agitation
on the Catholic Question many had given up the ‘Pioneer’—
which had a motto from Charles James Fox and was in the
van of progress— because it had taken Peel’s side about the
Papists, and had thus blotted its Liberalism with a tolera-
tion of Jesuitry and Baal; but they were illsatisfied with the
‘Trumpet,’ which—since its blasts against Rome, and in the
general flaccidity of the public mind (nobody knowing who
would support whom)—had become feeble in its blowing.
It was a time, according to a noticeable article in the
‘Pioneer,’ when the crying needs of the country might well
counteract a reluctance to public action on the part of men
whose minds had from long experience acquired breadth as
well as concentration, decision of judgment as well as toler-
ance, dispassionateness as well as energy— in fact, all those
qualities which in the melancholy experience of mankind
have been the least disposed to share lodgings.
Mr. Hackbutt, whose fluent speech was at that time float-
ing more widely than usual, and leaving much uncertainty
as to its ultimate channel, was heard to say in Mr. Hawley’s
office that the article in question ‘emanated’ from Brooke
of Tipton, and that Brooke had secretly bought the ‘Pioneer’